Things might not necessarily happen in that order, of course.

During his university days and while living along the Murray River near Echuca, Nathan Ashley used witchetty grubs for survival - not for eating, rather as bait.

Fisher-folk swore the grubs were a great way of boosting their catch.

This got Mr Ashley and his Bougainville primary school buddy Ian Wilkinson thinking. What if they could farm the Australian native critters, and sell them to creative chefs who wanted to show off authentic Aussie fare?

For the past four years, Mr Ashley - a Brisbane-based painter by day - has been trying to replicate the red gum on which witchetty grubs feed.

"They're really fussy eaters," he said.

The experiment is housed in old Coke bottles and equipment bought from the local hardware store. But it has led to a patent which protects his innovative scientific techniques.

And the incentive to produce conditions and food in which witchetty grubs can be farmed by the thousands recently received a significant boost.

Chinese scientists have weighed into a thought that the bigger of two types of Australian witchetty grub, if infected with a special type of "Chinese zombie-grub fungus", could produce "near-mythical" healing properties colloquially known in Asia as Chinese Viagra.

The traditional Chinese medicine is more formally known as "dong chong xia cao" which is literally translated to mean "winter grub summer grass".

The project has a long way to go.

The synthetic feed hasn't yet been perfected, although there are about a dozen witchetty grubs in Mr Ashley's garage making it their staple diet.

An effective farming technique is yet to be perfected.

The fungus theory is still to be proven.

And there are plenty of hoops to jump through before the Australian government will allow them to export native fauna to foreign shores.

But the upside for the men who spent their youth poking their fingers in tree stump burrows is that zombie-grub fungus fetches about $100 per gram in a Chinese market which trades between $5 billion and $11 billion of the stuff.

"Another expert estimates the wild harvest is responsible for 8 per cent of the Tibetan Autonomous Region's GDP and provides the main source of income to 300,000 Chinese Tibetans each summer," Mr Ashley said, quoting an article from the journal of Nature.

"It was while researching the biology of ghost moths that we stumbled across a very technical paper written by a team of scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences studying the DNA of a medicinal Himalayan zombie grub fungus.

"The much smaller ghost moth grubs found on the Himalayan Plateau are infected by spores from the parasitic fungus Ophiocordyceps sinensis, which turns them into a mushroom as the fungus consumes the body of the larvae, leaving just the exoskeleton, and come Spring, the fungus grows a club out of its head producing spores."

To cut a complex scientific argument short, one of the paper's authors says there's a realistic chance the same thing can happen with an Aussie witchetty grub.

The lab is a long way from the wild jungles and rivers of Bougainville Island, where Mr Ashley and Mr Wilkinson spent their primary school days until war broke out in 1989.

"While studying at university in Perth, we were roommates in a shared house," Mr Ashley said.

"We're both keen fishermen and this was when we first considered the idea of farming witchetty grubs. Ian also saw the potential to sell the grubs to adventurous gourmets and Indigenous Australians as bush tucker as well. We estimated the market to be worth several million dollars per annum."

The plan to imitate plant tissue eaten by witchetty grubs was hatched over many evenings spent reading scientific papers in fields like entomology, botany and microbiology.

"We developed ideas for a plant tissue feed system, and hopefully success as the world's first witchetty grub farmers," Mr Ashley said.

Add to that a plan to hit the Chinese traditional medicine market: "We hope to value add on our original innovation and infect as many of the biggest Aussie grubs (which are typically 5-10 times larger than Himalayan grubs) as we can produce and create an entirely new super species, with the same DNA, farmed sustainably and free of any chemical contamination."

Mr Ashley hopes to have more than 1000 witchetty grubs by the end of the year, and infection experiments finished by mid-year.