In a small room on campus, hungry beetles are feasting on a dead camel.

As they scurry in and out of an open freezer, they eat, defecate and reproduce all in the name of science.

Known as the dermestid colony, the carrion-eating bugs are housed in a trailer near UAF Facilities Services.

The colony's progress is checked at least every 24 hours to see how much flesh and other material they have consumed.

A keystone to many of the collections in the museum, the colony is used to clean skeletons from shrews to muskoxen to bear.

This is the first time the colony has had the taste of Bactrian camel; so far they haven't seemed to slow down their food intake.

According to Link Olson, curator of mammals for the University of Alaska Museum of the North, if there is not a biological food source available, the colony is fed dog food. Otherwise, "they eat drywall," he said.

Olson said it can take a matter of hours for the dermestids to clean a shrew skeleton if they are a "hot" colony. Larger skeletons may take several weeks to be stripped of flesh.

The dermestids are cheap and even sometimes free.

In the wild, they come to the site of any carcass after birds and other animals have had their fill.

A poster of a flower is taped to the door of the bug room. "Reverse psychology," Olson said with a smile. The room smells of, well, rotting flesh.

"We had an AP reporter in there who we thought was going to lose her lunch," he said, adding "but she kept it together."

According to Brandy Jacobsen, mammals collection manager and UAF alumna, some people don't react well to the smell. Jacobsen has worked at the museum for 11 years and said that one time she was in the bug room with someone who fainted.

She also recalled a time she took a break from preparing a specimen and went to the deli counter at Fred Meyer.

"The staff was smelling all the salads to see if they were rotten but it was actually us," she said with a laugh.

The bug house's neighbors don't seem to mind.

"We have not received complaints about the smell," said Jenny Barrett, public information officer for Facilities Services.

Another thing that smells in the bug trailer is the maceration tank.

The two bathtub-sized plastic tanks in the building are used to prepare marine mammal specimens by soaking them in aerated water.

According to the procedures manual, "If the tank is going well the water will be a whitish/grayish brown color and will be very cloudy and soupy. It will smell positively repulsive."

It also notes: "The macerating process will reduce all tissue to slimy muck that can be easily washed away."

Maceration is done at a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and is most often used when preparing marine mammals because of their size and fat content.

"The fat tends to repel the bugs," explained Olson.

Many North American museums use dermestid colonies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Before the colony gets to do its work, a lot of behind-the-scenes work is done. The mammal is stripped down to the skeleton in a basement lab in the museum.

A sample is taken from the heart, lung, liver, spleen, muscle and kidney, and recorded in the Alaska Frozen Tissue Collection. The data is also recorded in Arctos, a multi-institution, multi-collection database.

"We take tissue samples from everything that walks in the door -- or is dragged in," Jacobsen said.

Everything not used from a specimen is incinerated.

After samples are taken, the skeleton is brought to the- trailer and put in a heated tank that dries the meat still on it. According to Olson, "they [dermestids] prefer jerky to fresh meat."

After the dermestids clean the skeleton, it is soaked overnight in an ammonia solution to get rid of any grease and then washed and dried. After drying, the skeleton is frozen at -40 degrees Fahrenheit for 48 hours in a fumigation freezer.

This is done to everything organic in the museum collections to kill anything living present within the item, and thus prevent spreading bugs or bacteria.

So next time you head up the hill to the museum for a look at the many items on display, remember that a few thousand beetles are saying thanks for a free lunch.