A colony of 100 flesh-eating beetles have joined the staff at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London.

The Dermestes maculatus beetles measure 10 mm long and will be working behind the scenes at the museum with the grisly task of stripping whole animal carcases to skeletons. They will work in the dark as they hate being exposed to any light.

The NHM’s osteology (bone and teeth) collections include more than a million whole and partial skeletons. The collections – which are studied by scientists across the world – can help identify new species and understand the way an animal lived and are also used for research into skeletal structure.

However, many of the specimens waiting in the museum’s freezers are still whole and the beetles’ job is to strip away any flesh to reveal the bones underneath.

The main advantage of using the beetles is that every aspect of the bone is preserved – chemical processing alternatives such as hydrogen peroxide and carbon tetrachloride can often make bones fragile and destroy molecular information they held.

Their first meals will include an orange roughy fish, a long-tailed fruit bat and a very rare Norwegian puffin hound.

From the initial group of 100 beetles and larvae, the museum intends to breed around 1,000.

NHM curator and new manager of the beetles Patrick Campbell said: “They aren’t the most conventional colleagues but they do work very hard. The larvae will eat the most and when the group is established, they will get through about two to four kilos of flesh a week.”

As the beetles will eat any organic material, they will be kept under tight security, well away from the museum’s collections of stuffed animals and skins.

Skeletons removed from the dermestarium will be frozen and cleaned before moving to other parts of the site to ensure the beetles are not accidentally transferred to the collections.

There will be a free talk about the beetles by Patrick Campbell at the NHM’s Darwin Centre on 5 November at 2.30pm. Details: www.nhm.ac.uk