sciencefriday:

If you place a bowl of dog food in front of a pack of puppies, you’ll see a scurry of snouts scrambling for a bite. As all the slots of space around the bowl fill up, only so many puppies can eat at once. But, what happens when you have hundreds or thousands of puppies vying for a single bowl of food?

That’s the situation mechanical engineering professor, David Hu has on his hands when he plops an orange slice into a bin of full of little, wriggling creatures. To test the “Puppy Bowl Problem” on a larger scale, Hu turns to something a lot less furry (and a lot less cute) than puppies: maggots.

“They’re really just hungry little babies,” Hu says. He and a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology are constructing mathematical models of the maggots’ motion to see how so many of these hungry crawlers can eat so efficiently while looking at the variables that influence their speedy food consumption. They might also be the answer to our food waste problem. Meet the maggots of our latest Macroscope video here.