ABSTRACT
Insects that are reared on articial diets are used in many programs-as agents of biological control and sterile insect technologies (Knipling 1979), as feed for other animals (Versoi and French 1992), as bioreactors for the production of pharmaceuticals and other recombinant proteins (Hughes and Wood 1998), and as foods for people (DeFoliart 1999)—and one of their most important uses is in research on virtually all areas of entomology and of other biological sciences. Thousands of papers written over the past century deal with articial diets for insects. Although the topic of most of these papers is a subject other than articial diets, it is evident that high-quality insects are essential to the assurance of meaningful studies, and the quality of the insect diets is, in turn, essential to the acquisition of healthy laboratory insects.
