Over the past few years, I’ve been fascinated by the Black Soldier Fly (BSF), Hermetia illucens; an insect capable of turning organic waste into high-value protein and fertilizer. It’s small, quiet, and unassuming, yet it’s helping us rethink what agriculture could look like in a truly circular economy.

But there’s something that has always intrigued me.

In both research and industry, we often try to apply to the BSF the same genetic improvement tools we use for crops and livestock – pedigrees, individual tagging, and family tracking. These methods have worked for cows and corn, but they simply don’t fit the biology of this insect.

BSF larvae live and feed in dense groups. Thousands of them move together through their substrate, mixing, aerating, and transforming it into biomass. Their efficiency doesn’t come from competition – it comes from cooperation. Each larva feeds better because others are feeding beside it, breaking down the material and stabilizing the environment. Trying to isolate or tag them individually isn’t just impractical, it breaks the very process that makes them thrive. 

So here’s the key idea:
Instead of treating the BSF as a collection of individuals, we should treat each group – a tray, a container, a “mini-community” – as the real unit of selection.

A New Way to Think About Improvement
Imagine a large bioconversion plant as a set of boxes within boxes. Inside each small tray or bin, a community of larvae lives and works together, collectively transforming waste into protein. Each of these boxes behaves like a tiny ecosystem, i.e., an independent population with its own dynamics, performance, and genetic fingerprint.
If we treat each community as one “individual” in a larger selection process, something powerful happens. We can measure how each group performs (how much biomass it produces, how fast it grows, how efficiently it converts substrate), and select the best-performing communities to seed the next generation.
This is population-level selection, a shift from focusing on individuals to focusing on collective performance. It respects the biology of the insect and turns its social behavior into an advantage.
By replicating many of these small communities side by side, dozens, hundreds, or even thousands, we create a living network of tiny experimental populations. Each one becomes a data point, a building block in an evolving system. It’s like running hundreds of small experiments in parallel, each contributing to a broader evolutionary process.

Why This Matters
This modular, community-based model opens exciting possibilities. It allows BSF production to grow incrementally: add more trays, more communities, and the system scales without bottlenecks. It makes improvement faster and cheaper, because we can compare performance across modules instead of tracking individuals. And it’s inherently adaptable – small producers can use the same logic as large industrial facilities.
More importantly, it reframes how we see the insect itself.
BSF isn’t just a tool for waste management; it’s a biological system that thrives on cooperation. Its success comes from group behavior, from the collective metabolism of thousands of individuals working as one. Recognizing and harnessing that cooperation may be one of the most important steps toward truly sustainable insect farming.

Challenges and How We Tackle Them
Of course, working with small populations brings its own challenges.
If we’re not careful, each module could drift genetically, losing diversity, becoming too adapted to one specific environment, or diverging too far from others. These are the real risks of population-level selection.
But they’re also risks we can manage. By rotating genetic material between modules, maintaining sufficiently large effective populations, and monitoring genetic variation over time, we can keep evolution balanced, gaining performance without losing resilience. With today’s genomic tools, it’s possible to track how these tiny ecosystems evolve and fine-tune the process dynamically.

In short, what might seem like a limitation, having to work with groups instead of individuals – actually becomes a source of strength. Diversity, modularity, and cooperation all contribute to a system that is both efficient and adaptable.

From Idea to Practice
At NRGene Canada, we’ve begun implementing this philosophy: modular production, population-level selection, and genomic monitoring. Each tray becomes both a production unit and a small evolutionary experiment. The results so far are promising and confirm what the biology suggested all along – the BSF works best when we let it work together.

But this concept goes beyond any single company or project. It invites us to rethink how we design systems for living organisms: not as machines made of replaceable parts, but as networks of cooperating communities.

A Personal Note
My name is Sebastian A. Espinoza-Ulloa, and I’ve dedicated the past years to exploring how biology, ecology, evolution, and genomics can help us build more sustainable food systems.
Drawing on my PhD training in population genomics, ecology, and evolution, I study how natural processes of adaptation and diversity can inspire innovative strategies to make food production more sustainable and resilient.
The Black Soldier Fly has taught me something simple yet profound: sometimes, the smartest way to improve nature is to stop forcing it to fit our models—and instead, design our models around how life actually works.

If we see the BSF not as a collection of individuals but as a symphony of small, cooperative communities, we might just discover a new way to make agriculture not only more efficient, but more alive.