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It sounds like something out of a horror film -- flesh eating beetles that can clean a carcass
done to the bone. But the beetles I'm talking about work for the San Diego Natural History
Museum.
PHILIP UNITT: They are beetles of the family Dermestidos, which are specialized for feeding
on dried decaying flesh on the skeleton and get it down to be completely clean except
possibly for some tough connective tissue.
Philip Unitt is curator of the department of birds and mammals at the San Diego Natural
History Museum. He says the beetles are not a threat to humans because they are very slow
and only eat dead, dried muscle. But they could be a danger to the museum if they ever
got out of their display case.
PHILIP UNITT: Yes because the same beetles that we rely on to clean the skeletons can
destroy the collection of bird and mammal skins if they were to get into it.
One day a week Unitt devotes to prepping specimens like this one...
PHILIP UNITT: So now we apply cornmeal generously to keep any blood or body juices from soiling
the feathers
Unitt became interested in birds and their identification as a teenager.
PHILIP UNITT: I started reading the literature on bird distribution and ecology and realized
the critical role specimens played in understanding that so it was something that I wanted to
learn to do myself and our former curator was teaching ornithology at SDSU that semester
and he said come to the museum and learn how to skin birds.
The basic purpose of his department is to preserve birds and mammals for scientific
study. They have about 48,000 bird specimens and 23,000 mammal specimens accumulated over
a 140 years.
PHILIP UNITT: Here we have a skull of the short-tailed albatross picked up by A.W. Anthony
on Pacific Beach 6th of May 1893. Number 69 in our collection... Here we have a bat, a
flying fox collected on the island of Guadal Canal August 11th , 1944 so someone fighting
in world war 2 took time to document the bio diversity of Guadal Cnal.
People bring the Museum dead birds and animals that they find. Then Unitt has to decide if
the specimen is worth keeping, if it tells us a new story. Take this gull that struck
the new sunrise power link.
PHILIP UNITT: Birds strike power lines and kill themselves but we discovered a migration
that no one knew of Sabine's Gull that they would come up through the gulf of California
and then cross over.
Unitt points out the importance of museum collections by citing how pelican eggs helped
to reveal the detrimental impact of DDT. Scientists were able to note a calcium deficiency in
eggs shells that made them too fragile to incubate.
PHILIP UNITT: How would we know what the proper thickness of a pelican egg shell is if we
didn't have one collected from before DDT was ever invented. So the moral of the story
is that no matter what we collect and prepare the specimens for now future generations are
going to come up with uses that we can't even imagine.
That's because each generation of biologists has a responsibility to help us understand
the factors that can impact our environment.
PHILIP UNITT: Research collections in museums are like the ground floor of biology, all
your guides to identification of plants and animals were written by scientists working
with collections like ours.
Unitt often gets asked why the museum keeps so many examples of a single species.
PHILIP UNITT: One answer to that is, which one of us can represent the human species
that all species of animals really encompass diversity so to understand both diversity
within a species as well as diversity among species the collection is critical.
So remember that there's a lot more going on at the San Diego Natural History Museum
than what you see on display.