A large colony of flesh-eating beetles lives on campus in the University’s Museum of Natural Science. The colony is housed in a small closet in the basement of the building — a room dubbed “the Bug Room.”
“It’s just a room within a room here in the basement. At any given time there’s probably tens of thousands, and they’re all just roaming free in there,” said Steven Cardiff, the museum’s collections manager for birds and mammals and the man in charge of the Bug Room.
The beetles serve a very specific purpose — to clean skeletons.
“What we do is put skeletons — research skeletons — and the beetles eat all the flesh off for us and leave the bones,” Cardiff said. “And that’s what we want, is nice clean bones so we can study those.”
The skeletons Cardiff mentioned are usually frozen carcasses of various animals. The carcasses have already been skinned and gutted before being presented to the beetles. All that remains of the animal when it gets to the Bug Room is skeletal tissue and bones.
Typically, the skeletons of small rodents, mammals and birds are cleaned within matter of days. But Cardiff said the colony of beetles could clean an entire horse, given enough time.
“Just depends on the size of the specimen and the population density in the colony,” Cardiff said.
After the skeletons are cleaned and cataloged, they are ready to be studied. Cardiff said there are about 20,000 bird specimens and 100,000 mammal and small rodent specimens cataloged. The University has the third largest college animal skeleton collection, behind Michigan and Harvard.
The practice of letting a colony of beetles do the dirty work of cleaning skeletons started at the University some time in the ’50s, Cardiff said. Letting the animal skeleton sit in a dark room for about a week is much less labor intensive and repulsive than other methods of cleaning specimens.
Another less effective method of cleaning the skeletons requires putting them into a jar of water and simply waiting for the tissue and muscle to rot off the bones. However, the hard part of the job is pouring out the jar and picking through the rot for the bones. Cardiff called that part of the process “absolutely vile.”
“You can do a high volume of specimens, from very small to very large. So it’s a very efficient way of processing research specimens,” he said.
Many other institutions, such as The Smithsonian, use the same Bug Room technique as the University.
An unexpected difficulty in maintaining the Bug Room is population control, Cardiff said. There can be long periods of time when the University does not need newly-cleaned skeletons. Fortunately for the beetles, not all colleges have their own Bug Room. Other colleges, such as the University of New Orleans and Tulane University, send their uncleaned specimens to LSU. This unique opportunity gives the University a chance to help other colleges and keep its beetles fed.