Woman collects roadkill for beetles at Burke Museum

Thanks to Jamie Jaegel, the Burke Museum and a few thousand flesh-eating beetles, the Mill Creek beavers did not die in vain.

Perhaps you saw the news item last week: Seven beavers, possibly routed when heavy rains destroyed their lodge near the north edge of Mill Creek, were struck and killed by vehicles on a busy arterial during the night.

A state wildlife agent said he'd never seen anything like it.

Neither had Jaegel, who lives in South Everett and passed by the scene about 8 a.m. on her drive to work.

"I saw big, dark lumps all over the road. People were driving around them. Traffic was really slowing down," she said. It was clear that the animals, some of them adults weighing 40 pounds or more, were dead.

But Jaegel, who works as a private caregiver for a Seattle woman, happens to have what she calls "a minor hobby," taking roadkill to the Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus.

Over the past few years, she has brought the museum a couple of dozen dead critters she has found herself or been told about, including three river otters — found at different times, all near Stanwood — a mink, muskrat, mole, bat and assorted birds and squirrels.

"I'm not a squeamish person," Jaegel said. "And I think it's great that something so unfortunate can end up being of use in some way."

On the morning she saw the dead beavers, Jaegel didn't stop at the scene along 132nd Street Southeast but started making phone calls to find out where the animals were being taken. Calls to four agencies led her to a Mill Creek maintenance supervisor, who said the animals were bagged and in a trash bin, but he'd be willing to hand them over.

Jaegel picked them up that afternoon, kept them in her trunk overnight and delivered them to the museum the next day.

That's where the beetles come in. Housed in two stainless-steel cases the size of chest freezers in a lower floor of the Burke Museum, half-inch-long black beetles are busily working — never complaining, never talking a day off or even asking for a raise.

Their scientific name: Dermestes maculatus. Their task: To munch animal tissue away from bone, effectively "cleaning" a skeleton — or pieces of one — that could be used in a variety of kinds of research or educational displays.

Jeff Bradley, the museum's mammalogy collection manager, said the beetles, most common in hot and humid climates, have been doing work like this for museums and scientists for more than a century, and at the Burke Museum since at least the 1970s.

The Mill Creek beavers were too badly damaged to yield full skeletons, but sections of skull and bone will be welcome additions to the museum's collection of some 54,000 mammal specimens, Bradley said.

This week, besides the beavers, the museum's estimated 8,000 to 10,000 beetles have enjoyed a varied menu that includes a coyote skull, a seal flipper, squirrel bones and assorted shapes and sizes of birds.

Before animal samples are turned over to the beetles, they are dried, and the internal organs and much of the muscle removed.

In addition, for each animal, small tissue samples from organs such as the liver, kidney and heart are put into two-inch-long test tubes, cataloged and then placed in huge freezers housing the museum's genetic resources collection, started in 1986.

The collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world, now includes 7,800 tissue samples from 285 species of mammals and 35,000 tissues from 2,500 species of birds, said Sharon Birks, the museum's genetic resources manager.

Birks said those samples are made available to many different organizations studying issues such as the effects of environmental contamination, how viruses travel and how certain species are genetically distinct. They will be available in the future for research methods that aren't even known today.

All of that provides plenty of motivation for Jaegel to stick with her hobby of bringing specimens to the museum.

"For most of these animals, this is the only way you could get that close to them," she said. "The beavers were beautiful. Huge backs. Webbed feet. Massive tails."

On her delivery missions to the museum, Jaegel often takes along her 10-year-old daughter, Talula, whom she home-schools.

"We ask Jeff questions and he tells us interesting stuff we didn't know," she said. "It's very educational."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com