Of trophies & fire ants?

[41mag]

I've read mention in the past that a fire ant colony can be employed to strip a trophy to the bone.I'm curious about three things.First,during the summer how long would it take a colony to strip a boars head clean,second,are the ants themselves enough of a deterent to keep the head from being carried away by another scavenger?Finally,is this just an old wives tale & I should just search out some of those specialized beetles whose name escapes me?

 

[birddog]

41mag,
I don't know about the fire-ants, but the beetles are dermestid (or dermistad...something like that) beetles. Check out taxidermy.net and do a search on beetles. They're sure to have more information.

Joel

 

[Grayrock]

I've used ants to clean out seashells before. Worked pretty good.

 

[Jalexander]

When I was but a lad, I was waiting for the schoolbus when I spied a garden snake that had been run over earlier that morning. Being a curious kid, I gathered the snake up and placed it on a nearby red ant mound. It took those ants several days to strip the snake down to the bones.
A few years later I threw a freshly-killed chicken snake on a fire ant mound. The chicken snake was easily two feet longer than the garden snake, and four or five times bigger around. The fire ants had that snake stripped to the bone within two hours.
So yeah, they'd likely strip a boar's head PDQ. I do know that last summer we had a cow die, and between the buzzards and the fire ants there wasn't much left of her within a few days.

James

 

[Bayou Boy]

You usually have to skin the head first. Otherwise you end up with sunbaked pelt in places. I've done this with a european mount when I couldn't get flesh out of every nook and cranny after boiling. It takes a while in the ant pile but they get everything.

 

[41mag]

I was first turned on to this idea by a fellow snake keeper from Louisiana.He had had good success cleaning rattlesnake & large constrictor carcasses using fire ants.

I may try it & depending on the result,switch to the Beatles.

Thanks for your input.

 

[Grayrock]

I'd use the ants- The Beatles take much more time- considering there are only 2 of them left

 

[firesafety3]

To answer your other question, the ants are not a deterent to other scavengers carrying off your trophy head.

I lost an impressive bobcat skull like that. My mistake...won't happen again.

 

[Smoke]

I used to put things on red ant beds. There aren't nearly as many red ant beds as there used to be.

I've never tried putting anything on a Fire Ant mound. results may vary.

Smoke

 

[sumpnz]

My hunting buddy told me that what he's done in the past was collect some insects (forget what kind) from a road kill that was no more than a couple, three days old. He would put them in a drum large enough to contain whatever head he expected to collect from hunting along with some dirt, sawdust or woodchips or something. He would cover the drum to keep other scavangers from getting to it. He said it would take those bugs a few months, but in the end there'd only be a spotlessly clean skull, and some fur. I suppose you could do the same kind of thing by placing the head on an anthill and then inverting the drum over it. Probably have to tie or weigh down the drum to keep coyotes and such from knocking it over.