‘Superworms’ help scientists with a vexing task: Cleaning animal specimens
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Scientists are using ‘superworms’ as a safer, efficient way to clean animal skeletons
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In the city of Mashhad in northeast Iran, there’s a natural history museum associated with local Ferdowsi University that gets all manner of donations, including animals that died in the road and injured birds.
Details
With all these specimens pouring in, the research team quickly ran out of space.
“We don’t have enough freezers to put these dead animals,” says Niloofar Alaei Kakhki, a bioinformatician who’s studied and worked there. “We have to find a way to clean them,” she adds, so that these animals’ skeletons can be studied and exhibited.
Researchers use a range of techniques to strip the flesh off an organism, but each has its drawbacks. In a paper published this month in PLOS One, Alaei and her colleagues propose an alternative — employing a suite of superworms, a kind of hefty beetle larva that can capably pick a variety of animal skeletons clean.
Analysis
The worms work fast, yet they’re “super gentle,” says Alaei.
Among the existing methods for cleaning flesh off a specimen is chemical treatment, but that tends to be bad for the environment and can degrade the skeleton. Another option is boiling, but it’s time-consuming and can damage “tiny, delicate bones,” says Alaei.
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