Death and decomposition are the parts of our biology we try hardest to forget.
But to study life, you’ve got to look death in the face.
And try, if you can, to contain it...
The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley has mastered the art of preserving dead things.
They call this the library of life. It’s an enormous collection, providing future generations
of researchers a window back in time.
But specimens don’t look like this when they get here.
They still have flesh, skin and eyes.
These scientists receive hundreds of carcasses a year.
It’s their job to preserve each animal for long term use in the collections upstairs.
And the work is not for the squeamish.
They carefully remove skins to be stuffed,
take flesh samples and record stomach contents.
The final challenge is to clean the flesh from the bones without damaging them.
And to do this, preparators rely on an unlikely ally: flesh-eating beetles.
These dermestid beetles are direct descendants from the original colony established in this
museum in 1924.
The process was pioneered here.
In nature these charming little creatures are death homing devices.
They'll find a dead body about a week after death and lay eggs in the drying flesh.
The larvae emerge with a voracious appetite, outgrowing their skins six to eight times
in just days.
What makes dermestids ideal for this job is that they're fast and fastidious eaters.
They can pick a carcass clean while leaving even the most delicate structures intact.
But the alliance between beetles and museum is an uneasy one.
Downstairs the beetles are a critical tool. But if dermestids get loose upstairs, they
can wreak havoc in the library stacks... munching through the specimen drawers and ruining entire
collections.
That’s what happened here.
So museums try and keep a firewall between upstairs and downstairs… between death and
decomposition.
And if you think about it, so do we. Consider the modern coffin designed to ward off decay
But decomposition is part of life too.
And in the end... the bugs always win.