Investigating broiler chicken behaviour when offered live black soldier fly larvae

I recently conducted a simple, but interesting experiment: Testing the behaviour of broiler chickens with live black soldier fly larvae. How I did this was simply fill one row of feeder pans with live black soldier fly larvae. The other feeding line had the broiler farmer walk down to mimic my movement, except without feeding any insects into the pans. All the chickens still had access to the standard diet of dry, pelleted feed mixes. We then stood back for 10 minutes whilst the camera recorded the behaviour of the chickens.

The outcome is that you can clearly see a heavy migration of birds towards the insect full feeder pans. There is an element of a scarcity of resource at play here - when it’s gone, it’s gone. So the chickens become competitive with each other. This was observed after 5 or 6 days of consistent BSFL enrichment as chickens started clambering over one another to get to the insects. I also observed chickens scratching the litter for any larvae that had fallen out of the pans, which has shown to be good for aerating the litter and preventing hock burn. Finally, the chickens really devour the larvae and you can see this at the end of the video when there are very few insects left in the pans for the chickens to eat.

This experiment was primarily observational and there are clearly many further tests to carry out. I’d like to analyse the health, welfare and performance of the chickens when enriched with a BSFL diet. I’d like to include different inclusion rates of BSFL and collect more data for greater data robustness.

This is just the start and there is more to come - watch this space.