Mars needs insects

But gardening doesn’t just require a plot of land, a little water, a ray of sunlight. It also requires very vibrant ingredients: the insects, such as black soldier flies, and microorganisms that keep these ecological systems in good condition. A trip to Mars for a long stay does not only involve people. It will also come with crawling, crawling carry-ons that most people don’t think about when they imagine brave explorers setting foot on new worlds.

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Space travelers are not that far away.

“If you go into space right now, it’s more like a long camping trip,” said Scott Parazynski, a former NASA astronaut who spent nearly two months in space. Astronauts bring freeze-dried food (and flavor enhancers like hot sauce). While on the International Space Station, they might be able to view, but rarely consume, fresh vegetables from an experimental lettuce field.

“It’s a lot different than the kitchen downstairs and the spice rack,” said Dr. Parazynsky.

However, to stay on the surface of Mars for extended periods of time, astronauts will not be able to rely on their space supplies. They need Martian gardens. And the gardens of Mars will need some help – perhaps from the larvae of the black soldier fly and their droppings.

“They are very voracious eaters,” says Hellen Elissen, a researcher at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. “They eat almost everything.” And if you feed them well, they make a lot of frass.

Over the past five to ten years, scientists have started using frass – rich in nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and also bacteria – as a fertilizer. The material also contains chitin, taken from the insects’ bodies, and leftover organic matter. Dr. Elissen recently published a review article on the influence of frass on plants and soil, and one of her key findings was that the value of the insects’ waste coincides with the value of their food. Grass? Frass suffers. Give the larvae energy-rich food scraps? Jackpot.