Scientists monitoring data from satellites and ocean buoys declared the onset of El Niño in June. It is shaping up to be among the strongest in living memory.

For Clément Ray, chief executive of French insect-protein company Innovafeed, El Niño has been a welcome arrival. “It’s perfect timing for us,” he said.

Innovafeed breeds black soldier flies in a factory in northern France and turns the larvae into an ingredient for fish feed and other products. Until recently, it has been a premium product, a greener alternative to the fish meal that underpins the $300 billion-plus aquaculture industry.

But fish meal is selling for record-high prices after officials in Peru, the biggest producer of the anchovies used to make it, suspended this year’s catch early. They were worried about El Niño, a planetary dance of weather phenomena that starts with spiking heat in the Pacific and deals out drought and floods across continents. It occurs every few years and got its name—El Niño de Navidad, or the Christ child—from Peruvian fishermen, who long ago realized that Christmas sometimes brought heat that devastated fish stocks.

The anchovy shortage put fly larvae in the money.