[Nhcoll-l] Dermestid help

[Tonya.Haff at csiro.au]

Hi all,

We just discovered that we have a dermestid (variegated carpet beetle) infestation here. Very bad news, as we've been really successful at keeping our vaults clean until now. At any rate, I just found a few hundred adults on the floor of our bone vault - dead and dying. I'm sure they are eating some residual material on our dingo skulls, which were not cleaned properly  before storing (this is an historical problem). In addition, we've found a few (~20) in our mammal (skin and skulls) vault, and a very few (~10) in our bird vault. I'm not sure what the cause of this outbreak is, other than nice warm weather. In the bird and mammal  vaults they are concentrated near the door cracks to the emergency exists (yes this is probably a design flaw). My colleagues are hopeful they have just come in to investigate and have died, but my instinct tells me they may have been eating specimens and are now trying to leave.

Ideally we want them gone completely from everywhere, though I know this is easier said than done. For the bone vault, we can freeze the contents of the room, clean/fumigate the room, and then put the material back in. But the mammal and bird collections are larger and more delicate and so this is not so easy, and perhaps not warranted, given the limited number of dermestids we've found there. I'm wondering if any of you could recommend solutions for how to tackle this problem? Would placing pheromone traps to localise the problem and then freezing/fumigating specific cabinets be sufficient, and how would we know if it's not? Anyway, any thoughts or suggestions would be very welcome.

Cheers,

Tonya

---------------------------------------------------------
Dr Tonya Haff
Collections Manager
Australian National Wildlife Collection
National Research Collections Australia, CSIRO
Canberra, Australia
Phone: (+61) 02 62421566

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