Deep in the labyrinth of the American Museum of Natural History, beyond the gigantic suspended blue whale and the Alaska Brown Bears of the first floor, is an inconspicuous closed door. There is a small plate on that.
“Bug colony.”
Behind the door, only accessible for a handful of museum employees, thousands of carnivorous dyermestid beetles struggled the clock to prepare a task of copy that even the best-trained specialists of the museum cannot.
They eat the meat from animal skeletons and leave only clean bones.
Because many skeletons are too nice to be cleaned by human hands, the museum’s osteological preparation team turns to the six -legged staff to prepare them for research and display.
The work is performed in three gray wooden boxes the size of Footlockers who accommodate the colony. They are covered with stainless steel and their flip-up tops reveal beetles that swarm the earthly remains of various small animals, usually birds,. They party on the Gobbets of meat that cling to the carcasses.
The room is permeated with the soft, crackling sound of gnawing. “It sounds like something frying, or rice craps when you add milk,” said Rob Pascocello, the tender of the colony.
The beetles are small enough – only a few millimeters long – to crawl into the cut -outs of the smallest animals and nibble away without influencing delicate skeleton structures, said Scott Schaefer, who supervises the collection of the museum of more than 30 million copies and objects.
“They do the fine, detailed work that cannot be done by hand, because it is so delicate,” said Mr. Schaefer. It is softer than cooking a copy or soaking it in chemicals or acid. “
Museum officials say that the glory colony has incorporated the most bird collections more than 30,000 skeletal specimens in recent decades, plus countless other forms of bait. “They come in the small cracks and, if they are not checked, they will continue to eat until there is nothing left to eat,” said Mr. Schaefer.
On a recent weekday, Paul Sweet, a collection manager for the Ornithology department, stood in the Bugkamer and pointed out in the interest of scientific precision that the name was inaccurate.
Real bugs, known by their fans as the hemiptera -order, have mouth parts that pierce and suck. Beetles – Coleoptera – are usually cylindrical and have mouth parts that chew.
The colony had gone to the city with those mouth parts to reduce a once favorable pink flamingo into a modest bone bundle. A royal snow owl was picked clean in the same way. Then there was the small skeleton in a bus, with bones that are smaller than toothpicks.
“That’s a songbird,” said Mr. Pascocello.
Dermestid beetles are scavengers that are often found in the wild on carcasses of animals, and in the nests, webben and caves of animals.
Museum officials told the New York Times in 1979 That their Dermestid colony had remained self-sufficient since they were transferred from Africa in the 1930s. Mr Sweet said that the current group has been in the museum for 35 years, but could not say with certainty whether they were the descendants of the original colony.
Anyway, because the life of a beetle is only about six months, “they all kiss neven,” said Mr. Pascocello. He said that while the museum was closed during the Coronavirus Pandemie, he “held a backup colony in my bedroom.”
On this day, Mr. wanted Sweet a northern Gannet Skeleten, a sea bird found from Midland Beach on Staten Island. It was skinned, dried and cut by researchers of most of his meat before it was transferred to the colony for completing work.
The carcass became swarm within minutes. The beetles can pick a small bird within a few days, but may need two weeks for larger skeletons such as the Gannet.
Mr Pascocello once served the beetles an orangoutan; Mr. Sweet once gave them an emu. But the size of the beetles’ boxes is a factor. Larger copies must be served pieces, such as the carcass of a spicy Cuban crocodile known as Fidel, obtained from the Bronx Zoo in 2005.
Before the pristine skeletons are in boxes and catalogs, they are soaked in water and frozen for days to kill remaining beetles or eggs.
The beetles are not a threat to humans, but an infection of the museum’s specimen collection would be disastrous. The beetles well -fed keep them discouraging them, just like a strip of Vaseline to the top of their boxes and a sticky floor area over the doorway of the room.
If the supply of copies should block, Mr. Pascocello some chicken nearby as an emergency food. Mr. Sweet said he offered the feet of the colony pigs during the pandemic because it was the cheapest bone meat at the supermarket.
The gourmandising of the beetles is a memory that important science is not always executed in shiny, hygienic laboratories. On the door, under the sign “Bug Colony”, is a handwritten addendum:
“Bad scents that come from behind this door is normal.”
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