Unconventional Insect Resources: Prospects and Challenges

The unconventional insects could be the planet’s future heroes especially under the changing climate. Everyone agrees the importance of insects, however, till to date conservation practices are limited to some conventional members (silkworm, honeybee, lac insects, etc.) only and in fact addition of new members to the list is very rare for long time. It is true that many known insect species will fail to provide required ecosystem services under the changed climate. Unconventional insects’ conservation could feed growing global population. For example, housefly larvae (magmeal) can replace fish/poultry meal and have the ability to clean waste from the environment. In fact, a lot of unconventional insect species have the potentialities to fulfill huge demands of proteins especially in farmed/cultured animals. Although some findings on this aspect are encouraging, however, this prospective field of research is not yet popular throughout the globe. As a result, very insignificant numbers of insect species are explored and conserved till to date.  Local ecological knowledge (LEK) in many parts of the world would be the source of information exploring and conserving unconventional insect resources. Sharing and dissemination of information and ideas on this issue can accelerate to establish a timely field in Entomology.