These rooms at the ROM will be sure to give you the creepy-crawlies
The Royal Ontario Museum employs dermestid beetles to help with their research, but those aren't the only spooky creatures lurking in the museum...
Flesh-eaters and bloodsuckers are real, and you can find them at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).
While sounding like the stuff of nightmares, these creatures are actually crucial to our ecosystems, and the flesh-eaters play an important role in the museum's research.
"To get the skeletons that are in our research collection, they have to be cleaned off," said Burton Lim, Assistant Curator of Mammals at the Royal Ontario Museum.
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Before, researchers had to hand-pick the flesh off of the specimens, Lim told The Weather Network. "But someone came up with this great idea. Said, well, let's just do what, you know, nature does. So we have these domestic beetles; those are the beetles that clean off, you know, dead animals."
The beetles are dermestid beetles, commonly known as skin beetles or carpet beetles. They're kept in the ROM's "Bug Room," which is climate controlled to create optimal conditions for the flesh-eating beetles.
Luckily, Lim says the public doesn't have to worry about encountering these creepy creatures. The room is completely lined in metal to keep the beetles from wreaking havoc on the museum's massive specimen collection.
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While Lim has a vested interest in the creepy-crawly creatures, he's more interested in the 'bloodsuckers' in the ROM's bat cave exhibit.
"In Canada, we only have 20 species. The bats are hardier because they do different things for the winter. Some bats, they will migrate south. There are also groups of bats that actually hibernate for the winter."
Bats have become a spooky icon because of their unusual behaviour and have been the subject of folklore and scary stories for centuries.
"They're small, they're secretive, so they've got sort of this spooky, mysterious aura about them."
Copyedited by Anika Beaudry, a digital journalist at The Weather Network.
Thumbnail image made using imagery from Canva Pro.