The Very Hungry Caterpillar lives and thrives – on plastic. US author-illustrator Eric Carle’s children’s book may have a lesson for life. Caterpillars have as much of a sweet tooth as human children, but their appetite is far more unusual. The real-life counterpart of Carle’s colourful character prefers polyethylene to ice-cream and cake.

When retrieving empty honeycombs from plastic bags to throw away, Spanish bee researcher Federica Bertocchini discovered the bag was full of holes. The little insects had eaten it clear through. But it was colleagues in Cambridge / UK, taking the experiment further, who uncovered the true story. To a caterpillar, the PE raw material monoethylene glycol tastes like honey. Left alone on a plastic bag for 12 hours, 100 of the insects devoured 92 mg of it.

The moral of the story? Caterpillars are the perfect recyclers! Visions of mini-factories full of the tiny insects eating away the scourge of plastic waste littering the land – if not the oceans – are now dancing in Bertocchini’s head.