It’s not exactly glamorous work – though it is indulgent. Unlike Paul McCartney, our beetles eat meat, and a lot of it for their size. The dermestid beetles eat their way through soft tissue, leaving behind clean bones for the Natural Sciences collections.
Thanks to a collaboration with Unitec, the Museum was gifted a colony of dermestid beetles. The colony was likely started by collecting beetles from roadkill. Our Associate Curator Entomology, Melissa Kirk, identified the beetles as Dermestes maculatus, a beetle that isn’t native to Aotearoa, but has been around since the late 1800s. The beetles now reside just down the road in a facility at the Winter Gardens in the Domain, where they can be kept safely at arms-length from the collections. Though incredibly helpful, they would be a big danger to the taonga we store onsite at the Museum, they can eat through lots of different materials, not just animal flesh!
When presented with a new specimen – or lunch, as they might know it – the dermestid beetles get to work clearing away flesh over the course of about a week to several months, depending on the size of the specimen. Though it’s not always smooth sailing -the team of beetles can be incredibly picky eaters, sometimes rejecting our offerings altogether. Fish seem to be a resoundingly unpopular menu item.
You might ask- why do Museums around the world use this slightly brutish method of specimen preparation? Well, the dermestid beetles are really good at their jobs (when they want to be!). Before the beetles came on board, we primarily used cold water maceration, where specimens would slowly decompose in water, using naturally occurring bacteria. This method, though effective and still important for some specimens, takes a very long time, takes up valuable lab space, can degrade DNA, and perhaps most importantly - if a little subjectively -smells terrible. Using the cold water maceration method, a larger bird could take up to two years to prepare, but with our dermestid beetle colony, only about 4 weeks.
With the beetles having completed their work, our Natural Sciences team do some final cleaning and sterilisation, add the specimen’s information to their database, and add them to the collection where they can be used for research and display. With our new miniature employees, we’ve been able to prepare more new skeletons than otherwise would have been possible.
For the more brave-hearted, we have a video of the process…. but if you’re a little squeamish we understand if that’s not your cup of tea and applaud you for making it this far in the blog.