Mote Marine Laboratory

Bugging the Bone Collector

By: Ernest Brewer

There’s a bug lady at Mote Marine Laboratory.

She keeps beetles in a box, waiting to feed them the flesh of cetaceans. In her small shed at Mote Marine Laboratory, hundreds of insects eat through the lifeless frame of an animal.

Ruth DeLynn is an adjunct scientist in the Stranding Investigations Program and has been the lab’s volunteer bone collection curator for more than 20 years. She works with other scientists to determine why a particular cetacean — dolphin or whale — stranded and died, and she has created one of the largest marine mammal bone collections in the state.

“Everyone knows I’m a dolphin biologist; They all find it really interesting,” DeLynn says. Then she smirks. “It’s good dinner conversation.”

When a dolphin or whale strands or is found dead in area waters, it’s brought to Mote by the Stranding Investigations Program. Dead animals are examined, all physical abnormalities documented and then a necropsy, or animal autopsy, is done. “We weigh, examine and sample every organ,” DeLynn says. “Everything is recorded. Everything is measured. It’s a very detailed process.”

The skeletal remains are put into an aerated water barrel where bacteria eat flesh from bone, and the waste is sent to the sewer. The bones are then cleaned by hand with a power wash hose in a tub and put on racks to dry. DeLynn sometimes uses her dermestid beetles as an alternative way to prepare the bones.

The beetles are common enough — found in road kill and even carpets — and are the standard species used by museums to clean the flesh from bones. DeLynn started her original colony with bugs brought with her when she came to Mote from New York’s American Museum of Natural History. “I did a shark spine that could not have gotten as clean macerating as it did with the bugs. They (beetles) will go into the little holes, lay their eggs, and then the larvae eat their way out,” DeLynn says. “They do a gorgeous job.”

After that, the cleaned bones are put into an ammonia bath for a week and fumigated for three weeks to kill any latent eggs or bugs inside the bones. Once the bones dry, they’re ready to enter the collection and be examined.

“Cavities in the teeth, imperfections in the enamel, all these things get recorded,” DeLynn says. “Every fracture, every abnormality, it all gets recorded. The more (bones) you look at, the more you see. It’s pure research. You never know when a person is going to be interested in a particular thing, and go back. So this becomes a search library, really. It’s a reference source.”

Studying the bones, including fracture patterns and structure, helps scientists understand how an animal was stranded and how it died, says Dr. Nélio Barros, Stranding Investigations Program manager. “Studying skeletons helps elucidate the animal’s lifestyle. We are interested in the mortality patterns of the animals — human-induced and natural.”

DeLynn, Barros and others have been able to study bone fractures in some animals and found others to be arthritic, and many scientific papers have been written by scientists, college interns and researchers at other institutions who have studied Mote’s animal skeletons. “This really gives us a clue to animal behavior because the fractures often are inflicted by other dolphins,” DeLynn says.

Working with the bare bones can also help in species identification. Researchers take 32 measurements of the skull alone, DeLynn says. Those measurements can be used to help make a final determination of species in cases where the answer is not clear cut.

The collection now holds bones from more than 600 animals — 20 species of cetaceans — that are stored in boxes at the Goldstein Marine Mammal Center and are used for studies in many different areas of research. “There aren’t many places that do it as comprehensively as we do it,” DeLynn says of the dolphin and whale necropsies. “We really do a wonderful job.”

Learn more about: Stranding Investigations

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