When did KBLB report sending eggs over to Vietnam?
January 2023.
So why no production from these eggs until December 2023? We don’t know for certain, but we can speculate.
First, KBLB had to produce silkworms from the parent strains to be cross-bred for first-generation hybrid silkworms. Did KBLB send over enough eggs so that part of the egg shipment could be devoted to silk production and part could be devoted to producing more of the parent lines for future generation?
Probably not. So GSS/Prodigy had to build up the populations of the parent strains. But GSS/Prodigy ran into the same problem that KBLB was experiencing at HQ: their breeding pool was not healthy and increasing the population was slow.
Production was shut down in Vietnam while HQ sought answers.
In July, KBLB brought some sericulture experts onboard. These experts introduced new protocols that helped HQ in their quest to develop strong parent lines. These new protocols were shared with GSS/Prodigy and efforts to increase the breeding pool of the Jan 2023 parent lines were more effective . By October, GSS/Prodigy had enough parent silkworms to crossbreed for production. That led to the silk crop KBLB shared the photograph of in December.
Meanwhile, back at HQ, efforts to develop various hybrids were improved by the new protocols. Although they originally targeted Q3 as the date the new silkworm lines would be ready, they only have one new line bred to be homozygous by the end of 2023.
In your version of events, KBLB developed two new parent lines and sent the eggs over to Vietnam without so much as a peep to investors about the new lines or egg shipment. In my version, KBLB floundered around until July, not making much progress anywhere, until they found experts who knew more about how to breed silkworms to produce high quality eggs.
In my understanding, the ‘new’ hybrid system is the one introduced in January 2023. But KBLB will have better two-parent hybrids available in the Spring field trials, delayed by the fact that rearing healthy silkworms is more complicated than Thompson (and I) understood. Only when they got the right experts were they able to make progress.
We can’t determine from the available information who is correct at this time. Later data may allow us to understand which picture is correct. But you have to account for a puzzling issue: Why no new announcements of egg deliveries after Jan 2023? My explanation is simple: they didn’t happen. Your explanation will probably include some version of “Thompson didn’t PR this because of his long history of announcements that went nowhere.”
