Scientists Found Flesh-Eating Superworms Can Clean Skeletons for Museums
· Vice
There aren’t many people on Earth with a legitimate need for fast, efficient ways to clean skeletons. Count museum workers among the few. Curators and researchers constantly need perfectly cleaned skeletons for scientific research, education, and exhibits. According to a new study published in PLOS One, they may have a new bone-cleaning superweapon: superworms.
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These are flesh-eating larvae, commonly sold as reptile food, that can strip animal carcasses down to clean bone in anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days, depending on the animal’s size. Researchers from Iran and Germany tested the larvae on everything from tiny bats and mice to birds to a 9-pound wolf.
When you’ve got just the right number of very hungry superworms, the little critters remove nearly all the remaining tissue while leaving even the most delicate bones intact.
Museum Workers May Have a New Way to Clean Skeletons: Flesh-Eating Superworms
This is a big deal for museum curators, as cleaning skeletons has always been an unpleasant chore with few good options. Chemical and enzyme treatments are expensive, generate hazardous waste, and can damage fragile specimens. A lot of museums already rely on a living creature to chomp away at tissue, like colonies of dermestid beetles, Mother Nature’s reliable cleanup crew.
They’re good at their jobs, but they wreak havoc if they escape, since a rogue beetle colony can spread throughout museum collections, chewing through everything in sight, from taxidermy animals to historical artifacts.
If you get any of those problems, it was superworms. They don’t mature into flying adults that gather into a giant hungry cloud of bugs. They are inexpensive and readily available. They are a fairly low-maintenance critter to keep around. Researchers say the sweet spot is roughly 10 to 15 grams of larvae for every gram of carcass, which should be more than enough to clean a specimen quickly without damaging any of the bones they plan to display.
It’s not a perfect solution. Some large specimens, though, need an additional set of hungry larvae, and breeding replacement worms requires more effort than maintaining beetle colonies, but for small museums without specialized insect facilities, a bunch of starving worms could be the exact high-powered tool they’ve been looking for.
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