Flesh-eating bugs: new research shows how carrion beetles turn death into life

By Tancredi Caruso, Associate Professor, School of Biology and Environmental Science, University College Dublin

It was Halloween and the discussion had inevitably turned to death – and flesh-eating zombies. I had just finished lunch at a “research away day” when I got caught up in a conversation about carrion beetles with a new colleague of mine, Sheena Cotter.

The carrion beetles (also known as burying beetles or sexton beetles), which Sheena researches, are masters of death: they breed in the dead carcass of a mouse or a bird and, together with their larval brood, reduce it to bones and skin in a very short time. Then, a new cohort of beetles disperse. I confess the thought of dead corpses…

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