Preparing skeletal remains for museum display or forensic study has always been a delicate dance between thorough cleaning and not turning bones into dust. Existing methods - burial, digestive enzymes, chemical treatments - come with a buffet of downsides: bone damage, long processing times, high costs, or environmental hazards. Dermestid beetles have been the go-to for efficient, bone-friendly cleaning, but they come with a catch: escape artists that can infest museum collections faster than you can say 'quarantine.'

Enter the superworm. In a paper published in PLoS One, Fatemeh Rastekar and her team at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad propose that the larvae of Zophobas morio - a common pet food - could be the beetle's less problematic cousin. Superworm larvae have a 10 - 12 week lifespan versus the beetles' 5 - 7 weeks, and they don't pupate in crowded conditions, making containment a breeze. No complex colony management, no escapee infestations. But can they clean?

To test this, the researchers collected eight specimens: an Egyptian rosette, a house mouse, a little bittern, an alligator gar, a Eurasian eagle-owl, a rook, a wild cat, and a gray wolf. They skinned each, removed excess flesh and organs, and placed them in containers with superworm larvae, rotating larger specimens every six to eight hours. The larvae were fed fruit and vegetable peels to keep them alive (a diet of pure flesh is apparently a death sentence for them). After the larvae finished their meal, the skeletons were rinsed with warm water, briefly dipped in a 1% bleach solution (with a caution that it can damage bone), and coated with clear gloss varnish for display.

The optimal ratio? 10 to 15 grams of larvae per gram of specimen, minimizing cleaning time without damaging bones. Follow-up tests on three small bird skulls confirmed the results. The authors concluded that superworms offer an adaptable and effective alternative for skeletal preparation in museums and research settings - no escape panic required.