Survival of Dermestids in Low Oxygen Environments

Dermestidae feed on late stage decaying bodies and museum specimens. Their diet makes the beetles useful in the forensic and biological fields to clean bones of decaying bodies. However, some museums and other similar facilities, containing preserved carcasses, lose items due to dermestid infestation. A large amount of damage done in museums is from the beetles feeding on animal tissues as well as the exoskeletons of other insects making it a huge problem in museums.  Finding a way to control them is currently being researched. In this experiment, dermestids were exposed to severely hypoxic environments through immersion or placement in nitrogen atrmospheres.  At 25^o C, third stage larvae survived only 3 hours of immersion while in a nitrogen atmosphere, larvae survived more than 8 hours.  These findings add to a growing body of knowledge that hypoxia related to immersion is different than hypoxia related to low oxygen gas atmospheres.  The data also indicate that treatment of museum specimens by removal of oxygen will require longer periods of exposure to eliminate dermestid infestation.