Feature
| Everybody Loves a Mealworm By Katherine Gould This article appeared in the Winter 2002 edition of Zoo View. It is posted here with permission from the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association. For more information about the Los Angeles Zoo, please visit www.lazoo.org. |
| "I can't help putting my hands in there," says Fred Rhyme, as he sinks his fingers into a sea of undulating mealworms and scoops up a handful. "I just love 'em." Indeed, the 72-year-old has been having a love affair with mealworms since he started his company, Rainbow Mealworms, 50 years ago. What began as little more than a hobby (back then, mealworms were, according to Rhyme, "just fish bait"), has turned into a multimillion-dollar worm empire, and the nation’s largest supplier of mealworms. Each only about an inch long each, the tiny-legged, golden-brown worms are clearly big business. They are also a favorite treat of the animals at the Los Angeles Zoo, who gobble them up each year by the millions. And every one comes from Rainbow Mealworms. Housed on a nondescript side street in Compton, California, Rainbow Mealworms inhabits 19 buildings, including several converted bungalows and a few trailers. The only indoor furniture is row upon row of racks that hold plastic trays, each about 2 feet wide by 3 feet long and 4 inches deep. All of the trays are teeming with mealworms. While Rhyme grows some other bugs--Madagascar hissing cockroaches, wax worms, and crickets--it's the mealworms that he loves and that are the heart of his business. How does one grow mealworms? Start by placing about 2,000 mealworms in a couple of inches of wheat bran (the nutrient rich outer layer of wheat that's discarded in the process of making flour). Then throw in a few carrots and chunks of cactus to provide a little extra food and moisture. The worms will grow and transform into pupae, a sort of adolescent stage. Like so many adolescents, pupae have pasty skin, and are ungainly and unattractive. They have legs, but their bodies aren't developed. They still have worm tails. Later, the pupae cast off their pasty skin and worm tails and transform into black beetles. The beetles lay tiny eggs--smaller than grains of sand--in the bed of wheat bran, and then the beetles die. Their eggs, however, stick to the bottom of the tray until they hatch. Voila! What started as a cupful of wriggling squiggles has turned into 50,000 wriggling mealworms. While it may come as a surprise, newly hatched mealworms aren't yucky. They aren't squishy like earthworms, or disturbingly pale like maggots. They're toasty brown with shiny, smooth, hard shells. If worms were movie stars, mealworms would be Audrey Hepburn. Watching them is similar to gazing at waves crashing on the beach, or water tumbling out of a fountain--always the same, and yet, not quite the same. And like staring at the ocean, watching the undulating, ever-changing worms is mesmerizing. Mealworms feel neat moving in your hand. So neat, that when Rainbow Mealworms was young and Rhyme worked 12-hour days, he would soothe his tired feet by resting them in a bucket of massaging mealworms. These days, he is more inclined to spontaneously plunge his hands into the trays and ladle up a few hundred for pure tactile pleasure. There is no shortage of places to plunge; at any given time, there are between 14,000 and 16,000 trays full of worms. The trays slide into racks 8 feet high that are lined up in rows that fill every building. Rhyme also keeps 60-90 million mealworms in cold storage in a giant walk-in refrigerator. "It keeps them in the worm stage," he says. "We put them in coolers and that keeps them dormant." These dormant worms can be stored for up to six months. They can be shipped off with just a day to warm up and eat a quick snack. This way, Rhyme is never without a reserve of worms, even when he sells 47 million in a single day, as he did recently. Most mealworms grow to about one inch long. If they are fed a chemical-enriched diet, as are a variety Rhyme calls Rainbow Giants, they can reach an inch and a half in length. While some mealworms are put back in the trays to produce the next batch of their brethren, most go to the coolers to await shipment to zoos, pet stores, and bait shops in each of the 50 states. But first, the worms must be sifted and sorted. Sifting shakes out the dead skins, as well as bits of wheat bran, and what Rhyme calls "fertilizer" (and what your kids would call "worm poop"). Then the worms are sorted according to size. The smallest, just a quarter-inch long, feed baby birds and reptiles. Smalls are a half-inch long and beloved by finches. Medium and large worms are great for larger birds and reptiles, and some primates. Packing the mealworms is simple. A worker loosely crumples a piece of newspaper and stuffs it inside a cotton bag. "Otherwise, they'd all fall down to the bottom. They'd get real hot and die," says Rhyme. "Plus, they have something to read while they're traveling." A worker scoops up worms in a plastic cup, one line marked for 1,000 worms, the next line for 2,000 worms, and so on. However, a bucket is used to measure the Zoo's order--as many as 300,000 worms divided in bags of 10,000 to 15,000 each. The bags are put in sturdy cardboard boxes punctured with air holes. Shipping labels are attached, and the mealworms are ready for a trip by next-day air. The mealworms arrive the next day at the Zoo's commissary in the new Animal Health Center. There they are sorted again--a bag for the aviary, a couple of bags for the Marmoset Colony, a dozen worms for the Reptile House--before being delivered to keepers, along with other foods such as fresh vegetables, monkey chow, eggs, and meat. Mealworms are part of just about every keeper's food allotment. Animals all over the Zoo--from birds to primates to bears--love mealworms, though there are exceptions. "Gorillas hate mealworms," says Keeper Jennifer Chatfield. "They will flick them away." Tamarins, on the other hand, adore mealworms. They and the marmosets in the off-exhibit Marmoset Colony eat about 15,000 mealworms every week, so long as they get the big ones. "I have had tamarins literally throw back the little ones," says Keeper Carole Carniaux. In the aviaries, mealworms are a useful tool. Because keepers need to keep track of all the birds, each morning they sprinkle mealworms on the walkways, and then take an inventory when the birds fly in for their treats. This is especially helpful with the shyer birds, which might not appear without a little prompting. Mealworms are one of the enticements used to train birds to act on cue during the World of Birds Show. Abyssinian ground hornbills get mealworms as treats. The great horned owls consider mealworms enough of an incentive to stand on the scale every day. And the African crowned cranes get so excited at the prospect of mealworms they let out a sound somewhere between a gurgle and a purr that grows louder and more insistent when the keeper sprinkles mealworms on the ground. What makes the tiny mealworms so irresistible? "They’re moving," says Susie Kasielke, the Zoo's curator of birds. "They attract attention, and bring out that little bit of predator in everyone." The mealworm's desirability offers another boon in that they can, as need arises, be manipulated to be extra nutritious. Keepers feed them a gut-loading mixture of grain and calcium that the mealworms can't digest, and which transforms the already protein-rich mealworm into a multi-vitamin. "It's like the jelly in the jelly doughnut," Kasielke says. Back in the aviary, Keeper Cathy Christel whistles to let the birds know it's mealworm time. A starling flies over and perches on a tree behind her; the starlings are always the first to arrive when Christel begins sprinkling mealworms on the ground. A few more mealworms attract the azure-winged magpie and the fiscal shrike. Keeper Lynda Paul throws mealworms to the Inca terns, which catch them in midair. Even the violet plantain eater, which normally eats only fruits, is known to sample a mealworm now and then. It's like Kasielke says, "Everybody loves a mealworm." |
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Katherine Gould - (818) 635-2886 - keg@katherinegould.com