Right now, in a trailer above Castetter Hall, flesh-eating bugs are feasting on rotting meat.
But don’t worry, it’s purely scientific.
The bug room, as it’s referred to by the Division of Mammals, is a small trailer that smells like spoiled beef jerky, said Andrea Jackson, a biology undergrad who works there.
“I went home immediately the first time and had my mom smell my shirt,” she said. “She was like, ‘Ugh, that smells like rotting flesh …’ It’s a strong smell that just lingers until you take a shower.”
She was holding a small rodent’s skeleton and tasked with entering it into the Arctos database. She said she and coworkers take fresh specimens and get them ready for the museum.
“You kind of set yourself apart from it, and you realize you are doing science, not killing animals just for fun,” Jackson said.
The first step is capturing or receiving the specimen. This can be done in field studies, and some people even bring in roadkill, said Jon Dunnum, the museum’s collection manager.
“So they are going home, and see a beaver killed on the road, or a porcupine that was run over,” he said. “They pick them up, put them in bags, and call us.”
From there, Jackson said, she skins the animals and removes their vital organs.
“A good example, I guess, is kind of like a banana, but it’s just kind of ‘eh.’ You pull it to the side.”
Muscle tissues are frozen and the skeleton is cleaned. Then, they go to the bug room, where the flesh-eating beetles’ larva strip the bones clean of flesh better than any human or machine. Dunnum said all mammal museums have a bug room.
From there, the bones are stored, and the animal skins are stuffed with cotton and sewn shut, said Brooks Cohli, the TA in the Division of Mammals.
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“It’s not like normal taxidermy,” he said. “We don’t treat skin in any way. We try to make it look as real as possible, or that’s the goal.”
From there, the specimens are put into the system, and then put into the museum archives. It’s a long, visceral process, but Jackson said it’s been a great learning opportunity.
“You learn more here than in anatomy class,” she said. “With this particular job, I am able to see a whole other side of biology.”
Cohli said for his thesis, more than half of his samples will come from the museum.
“It’s just a priceless resource,” he said. “You can see how everything varies from a mouse up to a wolf.”
Alumni also said the work was eye-opening.
Dunnum worked there as a student, and so did the curator of the museum, Joe Cook. The museum also served as a career springboard for Suzanne Peurach, the mammal collection manager of USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. She said her time in the Division of Mammals directed her field of study.
“Working in the Division of Mammals at the Museum of Southwestern Biology was a life-changing event,” she said. “It sounds really corny, but it’s absolutely true. I took mammalogy and absolutely fell in love with the work.”
