By Dan Rahn
University of Georgia
For a deer hunter, a mounted trophy buck is the prize of a
lifetime, the result of years of relentless tracking, studying
signs, honing skills and finally bagging the perfect specimen for
the den wall. For carpet beetles, it’s just lunch.
“Carpet beetles, or dermestids, eat anything of animal origin —
fur, feathers, skin,” said Dan Suiter, a University of Georgia
Extension Service entomologist.
“Since it’s deer and duck season right now, I suspect some
successful hunters will be mounting their trophy bucks,” Suiter
said. “It’d be a shame if they didn’t protect them in future
years from dermestids.”
Dermestids (der-MESS-tids) are small, fairly innocent-looking
beetles. About three-sixteenths of an inch long, the adults are
oval insects that look a little like ladybugs with fall sweaters
on.
The larvae are about the same size — one-eighth to
three-sixteenths of an inch long and hairy. They look something
like miniature woolly bear caterpillars.
Fairly common
And they’re fairly common. If you look closely enough, you may
find them along the baseboards, quietly feeding on human or pet
hair, insects or other dead animal matter. “They’re a lot more
common than most people would think,” Suiter said.
Now that lady beetles are congregating inside houses in the
winter, he said, he’s finding dermestids feeding on the dead
beetles. “You can find them inside lights, too, in globes that
collect dead insects,” he said.
(Museums with large insect collections must periodically
fumigate, he said, at great expense to keep their inventories
from disappearing. Other museums, though, use dermestids to get
prized bones pristinely clean.)
The larvae do the most feeding damage. Fortunately, they’re not
into fast food. “They move slowly,” Suiter said. “You don’t
notice they’re there. Then one day you look closely at that
mounted trophy and realize the fur or the feathers have been
eaten away.”
Second wave
Their moseying pace puts them in the second wave of carrion
feeders in nature, he said. Flies and other faster creatures get
the fleshy parts, and the dermestids clean up the rest.
Dermestids can make a meal of wool clothes, fabrics and anything
else of animal origin, he said. They probably owe their common
name, Suiter said, to the damage they did to rugs and carpets
when they were more often made of wool and other animal fibers.
“Most carpets are synthetic fibers now,” he said. “So dermestids
don’t bother them. We don’t have much trouble with clothes moths,
either, because so many fabrics are synthetic now.”
For people who have mounted deer, turkeys, ducks or other
animals, it’s a good idea to know what the taxidermist has done
to discourage dermestids.
“Some of them insert moth balls inside the mount,” Suiter said.
“And that works. But even then, eventually the moth balls will
dissipate, and if you’re not checking closely, you can end up
with a lot of damage.”
Check closely
It’s best, he said, to check closely every few months for signs
of damage. If you find signs of dermestid feeding, you have two
main choices.
“If it’s a small item, you can just put it into a freezer for two
or three days,” Suiter said. “That will kill the insects.”
If it’s too large for that, some pest-control companies have
fumigation rooms where, for a fee, they can fumigate your trophy
mount and get rid of the dermestids.
“There aren’t a lot of companies that have those rooms, though,”
he said. “So you have to look for them.”
(Dan Rahn is a news editor with the University of Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
