Tonya - Have you considered Vapona pest strips hung in the vaults at a rate of
one strip/1,000 cu ft? After one month, you can remove them. Tom Parker
-----Original Message-----
From: Tonya.Haff <[email protected]>
To: nhcoll-l <[email protected]>; pestlist <[email protected]>
Cc: Alex.Drew <[email protected]>; Christopher.Wilson
<[email protected]>
Sent: Sun, Nov 18, 2018 11:12 pm
Subject: [pestlist] Dermestid help
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all, We just discovered that we have a dermestid (variegated carpet beetle)
infestation here. Very bad news, as we’ve been really successful at keeping our
vaults clean until now. At any rate, I just found a few hundred adults on the
floor of our bone vault – dead and dying. I’m sure they are eating some
residual material on our dingo skulls, which were not cleaned properly before
storing (this is an historical problem). In addition, we’ve found a few (~20)
in our mammal (skin and skulls) vault, and a very few (~10) in our bird vault.
I’m not sure what the cause of this outbreak is, other than nice warm weather.
In the bird and mammal vaults they are concentrated near the door cracks to
the emergency exists (yes this is probably a design flaw). My colleagues are
hopeful they have just come in to investigate and have died, but my instinct
tells me they may have been eating specimens and are now trying to leave.
Ideally we want them gone completely from everywhere, though I know this is
easier said than done. For the bone vault, we can freeze the contents of the
room, clean/fumigate the room, and then put the material back in. But the
mammal and bird collections are larger and more delicate and so this is not so
easy, and perhaps not warranted, given the limited number of dermestids we’ve
found there. I’m wondering if any of you could recommend solutions for how to
tackle this problem? Would placing pheromone traps to localise the problem and
then freezing/fumigating specific cabinets be sufficient, and how would we know
if it’s not? Anyway, any thoughts or suggestions would be very welcome.
Cheers, Tonya ---------------------------------------------------------
Dr Tonya Haff Collections Manager Australian National Wildlife Collection
National Research Collections Australia, CSIRO Canberra, Australia Phone: (+61)
02 62421566 --
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