The chipmunk was a schmuck, a nobody. He had been dead a long time. He would not be missed. If Anna Goldman knew anything, it was dead chipmunks, and this one was like all the rest — dead. Ever since becoming the lead preparer of dead mammals at the Field Museum, Goldman has kept dead chipmunks in her office refrigerator. If you opened it right now, chances are you would find a Garrett Popcorn bag full of dead chipmunks. A woman in Wisconsin with a big garden brings her dozens of dead chipmunks a few times a year; a woman in Naperville brings her dead chipmunks at least twice a month.
That’s a lot of dead chipmunks.
Which is where the flesh-eating beetles come in.
Actually? Maybe it’s a good thing this chipmunk was a nobody. His fate would be undignified, his destiny lurid. Unlike those dead chipmunks from Wisconsin and Naperville, he wore a tag reading “No Data.” That meant he left no paper trail. His origin was a mystery. But really, what’s one more dead chipmunk? After being skinned and left to dry, he looked like a chipmunk-shaped briquette anyway, tail curled beneath him and front paws stiff alongside his shriveled torso. Also, his tongue had been sliced out and his eyeballs gouged.
The sockets sat black, vacant.
Goldman’s flesh-eating beetles hate tongues and eyeballs. Too moist. They leave behind the tongues and eyes of dead animals the way you leave behind parsley at a restaurant. And so, after those have been hacked out and yanked away, a dead chipmunk — or dead snow leopard, or dead anteater, or dead buffalo, or dead sea lion — is transferred to Goldman’s unofficial domain, her chamber of horrors, the scariest room in the Field Museum:
The flesh-eating beetle room.
It’s an interior room, behind two sets of thick doors, on the third floor of the Field Museum, inaccessible to the public. Because if there’s anything worse than flesh-eating beetles, it’s flesh-eating beetles circling a church group from Indiana. That would be an annoyance. But not a deadly one. From time to time, a flesh-eating beetle does escape, and tourists are rarely eaten. This is because flesh-eating beetles — aka dermestid beetles — prefer dead things.
Goldman’s job is to strip dead mammals donated to the museum of their skin and hair and brains and guts, and leave researchers with piles of bones to study. She has assistants and volunteers who skin every beast. But these beetles: They do the more thorough job: “They have tiny mouths that can chew into places in a body you would never imagine,” said Goldman, standing in the center of the room a week before Halloween, watching flesh-eating beetles devour a robin carcass in tiny chomps.
She lifted the lid of another beetle cage.
One flew upward. She waved it gently back into its home. “They like me,” she said. “They don’t respond as well to others the way they respond to me.” She put No Data on a wire tray and lowered him into the cage.
Beetles pounced.
“Never gets old,” she said.
After a few seconds, beetles were massing on the chipmunk’s tail. Within 10 minutes, No Data was an undulating dark mound of bugs and beetle larva. His toes danced as the beetles worked into every crevice. “If you watch closely,” Goldman pointed out, “beetles will socialize on the body and learn to navigate its parameters. And then, sometimes, they will mount each other and have sex on top of the dead mammal.”
After 20 minutes of sweaty beetle bacchanal the knot grew less frantic. The bugs ate intensely, burrowing. Over the hiss of air ducts, the room began filling with a horrifying soundtrack.
Quiet, almost subliminal …
Snap … crackle … munch.
“In a couple of hours, we should see some rib,” Goldman said, reaching into the cage and shaking a few hundred beetles off the body of No Data, now riddled with holes. “Oh! We have rib already!” Her voice became tender: “Good job! You guys are doing great!” She grabbed a spray bottle and, to reward the bugs’ efficiency, misted their cage. Because, as any flesh-eating beetle would remind you: Gotta stay hydrated.
Goldman left an elevator and headed for her office, which is two stories beneath the lobby of the museum. This is not because her job is nauseating and disturbing, but it is almost Halloween, so it’s nice to imagine the worst.
“Wednesday is skinning day at the museum,” Goldman explained, entering the office and nodding to a few interns who sat quietly skinning squirrels and rodents at an autopsy table in the middle of the room. A pair of hairy, dead otters were curled in a corner. The skull of a calf born with two faces stared up from a box.
Despite what you might be thinking, this is not the second-scariest room in the Field Museum.
The second-scariest room is down the hall from Goldman’s office, and it’s not a room so much as a walk-in freezer. Goldman said it is the scariest room, because sometimes she worries she will be locked inside. And inside is not especially fun: The temperature is many degrees below zero, the smell is oppressively musty, and on shelves, on the floor, piled in every corner, there are garbage bags full of dead animals, every one waiting to meet the beetles. Their bodies press against the plastic. Blood splotches appear like dabs of raspberry jam on wax paper. The animals, donated, come from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, zookeepers, farm owners, gardeners. The bags hold bats, monkeys, deer, bears, coyotes, pelicans. “I saw a bag marked ‘Siberian tiger guts,'” she said. “I thought it was a joke so I thawed it. And yup: Siberian tiger guts.”
Anna Goldman is 31, has bright blue eyes and a riot of blond, “Annie”-esque curls that people tend to assume are crawling with flesh-eating beetles. But, as she notes for the umpteenth time: She is not dead enough. She has a tattoo of a praying mantis on her left shoulder, a South African ground beetle on her left biceps and, below her left shoulder, her first tattoo, a mosquito. Mosquitoes, she said, were a gateway insect.
Goldman lives on a farm in Wisconsin. She grew up in Glencoe and attended New Trier Township High School. She is unassuming and speaks with a dry directness: “I fell in love with bugs when I was 9. I went to a Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin. We would go to service in the morning and the evening, and we were next to a freshwater lake, so we were mosquito food. Instead of being upset by this, I started to dissect mosquitoes and study their feeding patterns, identify species. I wanted the mosquitoes to come to me. I was hooked.”
Third grade, she brought a deer leg to show and tell.
“I found it in the woods decomposing and put it in a garbage bag, and people thought I was crazy,” she said. “My mother had to meet the principal later to talk about ‘my issues,’ but my mom understood; she knew I wasn’t a serial killer. I was just fascinated with anatomy. Serial killers like to torture animals. I just like seeing them dead.”
She heard herself.
“Also, alive! I like alive animals too!”
She attended the College of the Atlantic in Maine and studied human ecology, then interned at the Field Museum’s insect division, where her first responsibility was the delicate task of “shaving spider genitalia.” Later, when Goldman was offered the job she has — her official title is assistant collections manager, not “chipmunk disposer” — she was asked if she would be comfortable inside the flesh-eating beetle room. Not everyone at the museum likes this place. Makes you instinctively itchy. She said she was comfortable, though. Within days of starting, she was having dreams about dermestid scavenger beetles. Within a few years, well: “They are very cute,” she said, pinching one between two fingers, its antennae roving madly, its buggy body struggling.
Then the beetles ate her.
Sorry, that’s a lie: The beetles have not eaten Anna Goldman. Not yet. But if they ever do, the last thing she’ll see is the psych-ward, concrete, yellow walls of the beetle room. Its flat lighting. Its storage boxes, stacked in towers, awaiting new bones. Its cobwebs, which are everywhere, and encouraged (spiders halt beetle larvae from burrowing through the wooden frames around the cage lids, and the webs deter any beetle eager to fly the coop). Also, the temperature of the room will be a mild 75 degrees (beetles like it warm but not too warm). And the smell — before you can even describe the unearthly stank, Goldman says:
“A mix of drying muscle, fat and poop.”
And for the record, many of the beetles, once gorged, would simply die inside of Goldman’s skeleton; these beetles grow to adulthood and drop dead within three months. They would need two weeks to turn her into bone.
But eating times may vary.
On a shelf in the beetle room, an African wild dog sat decapitated, chopped to bits: it would become bone in five days. Beside it, a flayed, headless squirrel — within two days, thoroughly devoured. There are nine beetle cages, each roughly the size of a home aquarium, each topped with mesh lids, each layered with a sedimentary bedrock of exoskeleton, excrement and freshly dead flesh-eating beetles. As Goldman lifted the lid of a cage and sifted around the white ribs and skull of a raven, she considered how many beetles were in this room.
She decided she didn’t know — millions? Occupancy rates are unknown.
Now, to shiver your spines: The flesh-eating beetles of the Field Museum are a bit of a mystery. A stray dead chipmunk or two aside, “everything in this museum is documented, even the most mundane objects,” Goldman said. “Yet these beetles: It’s completely unknown how we got them. When I came here I was curious (about where they came from). This colony is a black hole. We know beetles first became a museum practice in France in the 19th century. We know we’re one of the only places with a flesh-eating beetle colony in Chicago” — some taxidermists are known to keep their own beetles for private use — “but we don’t know about this colony. Only that it’s maybe 60 years old, and while other institutions tend to see colonies collapse with their beetles, then have to repopulate, our colony has been wildly successful. The museum never had a problem.”
Eventually these enduring uber-bugs — each one a coffee bean of horror, a centimeter long — will overthrow her, overtake Chicago. You will need to know a few essential things: They don’t like fish, they hate possum. “We have a researcher who preserves specimens in hooch,” Goldman said, “and the beetles love it.”
Also, as Goldman insists, they are not some faceless nightmare: “They have personalities! Some want to fly. Some are slow. Some are curious. When they end up on my hand — I swear they lean back their heads and look up to me.”
She giggled.
“But, of course, if I were dead, they would like me more.”
cborrelli@tribune.com Twitter @borrelli
