Deep within the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, you'll find perhaps the quietest and most efficient group of employees behind a door marked "Bug Colony." Housed in metal-lined wooden boxes, beetles specialize in stripping the flesh from animal carcasses and cleaning bones that are too delicate for human hands, reports the New York Times. Their precision work helps prepare specimens for research and display, including thousands of birds and other creatures. "They do the fine, detailed work that cannot be done by hand, because it's so delicate," says Scott Schaefer, who oversees the museum's 30 million-item collection.
Museum officials told the Times in 1979 that a beetle colony brought from Africa to the institution in the 1930s remained self-sustaining in the years after, but it's not clear if the current group are descendants of the original colony. But their work has been so effective over the decades that the museum has reportedly used them to process more than 30,000 bird skeletons alone. And while the name "Bug Colony" is catchy, it's technically incorrect—these are beetles, not true bugs, as Paul Sweet, collection manager for ornithology, points out. And their appetite is voracious; specimens from flamingos to songbirds to crocodiles have all been reduced to pristine skeletons. Schaefer said, "They get into the small crevices and, if left unchecked, keep eating until there's nothing left to eat."
While harmless to humans, the beetles—which have a lifespan of just six months—must be carefully contained to prevent them from damaging the museum's collections. Their boxes are lined with Vaseline and the floor is sticky to keep them from escaping. They're fed a steady supply of specimens, and in emergencies, even pigs' feet. And despite their macabre task, the beetles are a reminder that behind every polished museum exhibit there's often a lot of painstaking and less-than-glamorous work. As the sign on the Bug Room door warns: "Bad odors emanating from behind this door is normal." (More science stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
