SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
At cookouts later today, you might find yourself criticizing young folks for taking to the ribs and potato salad like hyenas or piranhas. The next story brings us another creature that can be compared to ravenous children, and it's being put to good use by museums. NPR's Ari Daniel explains.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: In Mashhad in northeast Iran, there's a natural history museum associated with the local university that gets all sorts of donations.
NILOOFAR ALAEI KAKHKI: If some people find some dead animal or some injured bird, they just bring it to the museum.
DANIEL: Niloofar Alaei Kakhki is a bioinformatician who studied and worked at this museum. With all these specimens pouring in, the research team soon ran out of space.
ALAEI KAKHKI: We don't have enough freezer to put these dead animal. Then we have to find a way to just clean them.
DANIEL: So that these animals' skeletons can be studied and exhibited. Researchers can use a range of techniques to strip the flesh off an organism, but each has its drawbacks. There are chemical treatments, but those tend to be bad for the environment and can degrade the skeleton. There's boiling the specimen.
ALAEI KAKHKI: That is really time consuming.
DANIEL: Then there's the use of dermestid beetles, which quickly gobble up an animal's flesh, but if they escape, they can destroy museum specimens elsewhere by chewing through feathers and dried skin. Then some years ago, Alaei's colleagues in Iran turned their attention to a different organism, the superworm - a hefty, nearly finger-sized larva of another kind of beetle with large chewing mandibles.
ALAEI KAKHKI: Why not use this dead animal to feed the superworm, and superworm can help to clean them.
DANIEL: Alaei says that as long as superworms are kept together in a group, they remain as larvae, unable to wreak havoc elsewhere in the museum.
ALAEI KAKHKI: You can reuse the same larvae for almost six months.
DANIEL: In a new study, Alaei and her colleagues offered the superworms dead animals of all sizes, from mice, fish and small birds to wolves and wild cats. They prep the specimens slightly and then let the superworms have at them. Alaei says they did a remarkable job.
ALAEI KAKHKI: It's so surprising that - how superworm can work so fast, and at the same time, super gentle, even the ribs of the fish, which is super, super tiny.
DANIEL: All picked clean with no apparent side effects, she says. The researchers found that 10 to 15 larvae do a good job cleaning a specimen. Alaei hopes the superworm's success in this arena could be good news for all kinds of institutions.
ALAEI KAKHKI: Even the small museum from some countries that maybe they don't have lots of these kind of fancy facilities.
DAMIEN CHARABIDZE: The study is just adding one more possibility when you need to clean something.
DANIEL: Damien Charabidze is a forensic entomologist at the University of Lille in France who wasn't involved in the research. He says that superworms may well be easier to control than dermestid beetles, but he worries their powerful mandibles could inadvertently snap a small bone. Plus, although they're omnivores, they prefer a vegetarian diet. So cadavers...
CHARABIDZE: It's not their usual food.
DANIEL: Which could make them more finicky feeders.
CHARABIDZE: So that may be something to check.
DANIEL: The research appears in the journal PLOS One. As the paper was nearing publication, three of the four authors, all based in Iran, could no longer receive email due to the internet blackout that Iranian officials had imposed on the country during the war. That's why I interviewed Alaei, who's now based in Germany. PLOS One agreed to make her the primary contact for the paper.
ALAEI KAKHKI: PLOS One just help us a lot.
DANIEL: The study was made available to the world this week.
Ari Daniel, NPR News.
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