Science Found a Better Way to Eat Your Corpse (It's Worms)

The Problem: Too Many Dead Animals, Not Enough Freezers

Ferdowsi University's natural history museum in Mashhad, in northeast Iran, has a donation problem. People keep bringing in roadkill and injured birds and dead things of all descriptions, and the museum keeps running out of places to put them. According to NPR, bioinformatician Niloofar Alaei Kakhki put it plainly: "We don't have enough freezers to put these dead animals."

The goal, when you're a natural history museum, is to get the skeleton. Skeletons are what you study, what you exhibit, what you ship to other researchers. The flesh is, in a technical sense, the problem. So you need to remove it. Efficiently, cheaply, without destroying the bones. That's harder than it sounds.

Your Existing Options Are All Terrible

The current toolkit for de-fleshing specimens is a catalog of compromises, and none of them are great. Chemical treatment, as NPR reports Alaei explains, is bad for the environment and can degrade the very skeleton you're trying to preserve. Boiling works but takes forever and can wreck "tiny, delicate bones." Great if you want a wolf skull. Less great if you're trying to preserve fish ribs, which are, as Alaei puts it, "super, super tiny."

There's also the dermestid beetle option, which the natural history world has used for decades. Dermestid beetles are fast and effective, but here's the catch: if they escape into the rest of the museum, they will eat the existing collection. Feathers, dried skin, preserved specimens, basically anything biological is on the menu. You solve one problem and create a much more expensive one. So the search was on for something better.

Enter the Superworm, Stage Left

Zophobas morio is native to South and Central America, almost the length of a human finger, and equipped with serious chewing mandibles. Pet stores sell them as feed for lizards and large birds. Alaei and her colleagues in Iran looked at these chunky larvae and asked the obvious follow-up question: what if they did the eating instead?

The results, published this month in PLOS One, are genuinely impressive. The team exposed superworms to dead animals across a wide size range, from mice and small birds all the way up to wolves and wild cats. They softened the specimens briefly in hot water first, then stepped back and let the worms work. NPR reports that Alaei says they cleaned everything thoroughly, with no apparent damage to the bones. Ten to fifteen larvae hits the sweet spot, enough to make real progress without getting so crowded that they start breaking things.

Here's the best part. Superworms only transform into adult beetles when they're isolated from other superworms. Keep them together in a group and they stay larvae indefinitely, locked in their useful, flesh-eating, manageable state. Alaei says you can reuse the same colony for nearly six months. They are, by design, contained.

The Skeptics Have Notes

Not everyone is ready to throw out the old playbook. Damien Charabidze, a forensic entomologist at the University of Lille in France who wasn't involved in the study, told NPR he sees the appeal but worries those powerful mandibles could accidentally snap a small bone. He also points out that superworms are omnivores who actually prefer vegetables, meaning a cadaver is not exactly their dream meal. Finicky, flesh-reluctant worms are not ideal for a museum backlog.

Marna Sakalem, an anatomist at the State University of Londrina in Brazil, raised similar questions about bone damage. She also pushed back on the dermestid beetle escape risk, noting that in five years of working with them, she's never had a breakout. Fair enough. The point isn't that superworms replace everything else. As Charabidze told NPR, this study "is adding one more possibility when you need to clean something." Which is how science is supposed to work.

Why This Actually Matters Beyond the Gross Factor

Alaei has since moved to the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, and she's thinking bigger than one Iranian university's overflow problem. The commercial availability of superworms is a genuine advantage. You don't need a specialized supplier or a controlled lab environment. You need a pet store and some dead animals, both of which most natural history institutions have access to.

Smaller museums and research institutions in lower-resource settings are the real target audience here. Chemical treatment requires infrastructure. Dermestid beetle colonies require careful management. Superworms require a container, some company, and a willing corpse. For institutions scrambling to process specimens without a large budget or a staff of specialists, that accessibility matters. This is the kind of unglamorous, practical science that doesn't get TED Talks but absolutely gets results.