News Life Here’s how long it would take 100 worms to eat the plastic in one face mask An experiment reveals that such bio-solutions to our plastics problem will likely fall short Even a natural genius at plastic recycling like the yellow mealworm turns out to be ridiculously inadequate at coping with the amount of microplastics humans create. Fernando Trabanco Fotografía/Getty Images Share this:EmailFacebookTwitterPinterestPocketRedditPrint By Susan Milius December 3, 2024 at 7:01 pm Insects rank high among humankind’s go-to creatures for strangeness: Think movie monster inspirations or extreme biophysics (SN: 11/7/22).