In a museum, beetles are eating flesh for science

The six-legged staffers of the American Museum of Natural History leave behind neatly tidied bones

- COREY KILGANNON

Deep in the labyrinth of the American Museum of Natural History, past the giant suspended blue whale and the first floor's Alaska brown bears, is an unobtrusive locked door. On it, there is a small sign: "Bug Colony."

Behind the door, accessible only to a handful of museum employees, thousands of flesh-eating dermestid beetles toil around the clock handling a task of specimen preparation that even the museum's best trained specialists cannot.

They eat the meat off animal skeletons, leaving only clean bones behind. Since many skeletons are too fine to be cleaned by human hands, the museum's osteological preparation team turns to the six-legged staffers to prepare them for research and display.

The work is carried out in three gray wooden boxes the size of footlockers that house the colony. They are lined with stainless steel and their flip-up tops reveal beetles swarming the earthly remains of various small animals, mostly birds. They feast upon the gobbets of flesh clinging to the carcasses.

The room is pervaded by the soft, crackling sound of gnawing. "It sounds like something frying, or rice krispies when you add milk," said Rob Pascocello, the colony's tender.