Clean Your Plate

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time at museums.

Whether it's geology, science, arts, or general history, there are few places like a good museum for immersing yourself in the past.

At their most cynical, they are tax havens for rich donors.

But at their best, they provide centers for culture, learning, and research.

If this show has taught me anything over the years, it's that the past is still very much alive in small, tangible ways, because life leaves behind evidence, from the fossils of the dinosaurs to the footprints of small creatures walking through your backyard.

And all that evidence requires intensive cataloging and studying from many, many people.

But it's not just people who work at museums.

Some of their work is done by colleagues that aren't exactly human.

I'd like to introduce you to the strangest employee of many natural history museums, a creature called the dermistid beetle.

These small bugs have been part of museum preservation for over a century, and their function is a delicate one.

You see, animal bones can be incredibly fragile, and cleaning them with man-made tools would likely damage or destroy precious specimens.

It's possible to use boiling water to clean individual bones, but it's a labor-intensive process, and it contains many opportunities for human error.

So, what museums do is unleash a small army of dermistids on animal carcasses and let them do the work for them.

Both larvae and fully grown beetles eat the flesh from the bones until they're spotless and ready to exhibit.

It's the larvae that are particularly effective, leaving even the smallest bones without a scratch on them.

It's not a perfect process, and sometimes museum employees need to use tricks to entice the creatures to feed on these animal parts.

And these tricks include drying out animal carcasses or painting less appetizing meats with things like bacon grease.

Now, it's not definitively known where this practice started, but some theorize that the first dermisted beetles used in a museum were in Kansas University in 1895.

There, they were employed by a man named Charles Dean Bunker to clean full skeletons for study.

But given how widespread the practice has become, it's very possible that Bunker was not the first man to attempt using bugs to clean bones.

What makes dermisted beetles especially useful is that they're surprisingly picky eaters for what they do.

They won't touch anything that's been preserved, like fur, feathers, or organs, and they also don't touch anything that's been treated with formaldehyde.

Therefore, the chances of them damaging completed exhibit pieces is very low.

In the wild, dermistid beetles are a little bit more problematic, though.

They appear wherever there is carrion, and sometimes they appear in places where there is no carrion at all.

Certain strains of dermistids are fond of violin strings, causing stress to musicians all over the world.

They're called bow beetles, nesting on the strings that are made with animal guts.

The regularity with which they appear on dead bodies left in nature proves useful in forensics, too.

When a decomposing human body is found in the wilderness, forensic analysts can use the life cycle of the beetles as a way of determining the time of death.

It's easy to write certain creatures off as parasites, particularly insects like dermastid beetles that nest in rotten corpses, moldy wood, roadkill, and rank animal flesh.

But as we continue to study the ways the natural world works, it's worth remembering that even the gross little insects have a role to play.

And sometimes they can be the most curious of lab assistants.

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Okay, ladies, when I said we came to play, didn't I mean it?

This Disney cruise got me feeling like a queen.

We can get massages at Census Pa, have a meet and greet with Black Panther.

Ooh, I love him.

And I can't wait to sunbathe on the private island, and the kids will be fine.

Girl, they're good.

Exactly.

While they hang in the kids' club with Mickey Mouse, we can do our thing.

Mm-hmm.

And do it well.

All day, Disney Cruise Line is where we came to play.

The three British airmen had seen miracles in the past few days.

Their plane had been forced to land in Nazi-occupied Belgium, but they had narrowly avoided capture by the Germans.

They somehow lucked their way into a Belgian underground safe house, and now they were being told that a fearless secret operative was coming to lead them home.

As she entered the room, though, the tired airmen thought that she looked like one miracle too many.

They listened in stunned silence as a diminutive, dark-haired young woman explained that she was now their mother.

And as their mother, it was her job to get all three of them to safety in Spain.

She left, and it was a while before one of the airmen broke the silence.

Our lives are going to depend on a schoolgirl?

Small and young as she was, André de Jong was no schoolgirl.

In fact, the 24-year-old was the leader of the Comet Line, a secret 500-mile underground path from Nazi-occupied Belgium to freedom in Spain.

Andre was born in Belgium in 1916, and from a young age, she knew that she wanted to help her people.

Her hero was Edith Edith Cavill, a nurse who had helped hundreds of Allied soldiers escape German camps during World War I.

So it only followed that when Germany began to invade Belgium in 1940, Andre jumped right in to help.

She joined the Red Cross as a nurse helping captured Allied soldiers, but her real work was with the Belgian resistance.

She started by bringing British soldiers captured at Dunkirk to safe houses and getting them disguises and fake IDs.

While the soldiers were safe for the time being, getting them back home was a whole other challenge.

But Andre was determined to live up to her hero Edith, and soon enough, she and a few like-minded friends came up with a plan.

They would lead small groups of soldiers in disguise through the countryside, taking trains, buses, even walking through fields.

They'd identified sympathetic citizens, and they would use homes as safe houses.

And with extreme care, they would lead the soldiers 500 miles through France, cross the Pyrenees, and get them to Spain.

They'd bring the soldiers to the British embassy in Bilbao, and the British could get them to the British-owned Gibraltar at the southern tip of Spain, and from there they could safely be ferried or flown home.

Through trial and error, Andre and her friends soon found that this was easier said than done.

To avoid German patrols, they had to travel miles out of their way.

Several conspirators were captured, killed, or sent to concentration camps, including Andre's own father.

And it was a hard task to feed, clothe, and keep captured soldiers healthy on the long march to Spain.

Andre famously told many of the soldiers that they would be lucky to get through it without being captured or even dying.

Despite all this, though, Andre's escape route gained a reputation for being the quickest way home, which gained it the nickname the Comet Line.

For two whole years, Andre herself led dozens of expeditions to the British Consulate in Bilbao and personally saved 118 Allied soldiers.

With each successful mission, Andre was also able to smuggle information back to the Belgian resistance.

But the Comet Line came crashing to the ground in January of 1943 when Andre was betrayed.

She had arrived in a French Basque town just over the border from Spain.

She and three British airmen planned to spend the night in a safe house and cross the border in the morning, but the group was spotted by a neighbor who alerted the German authorities.

Andre and the soldiers were captured and sent to concentration camps, but Andre's small size and unassuming looks saved her once again.

While being questioned at Ravensbruck concentration camp, the Gestapo refused to believe her when she admitted that she was the organizer of the Comet Line.

They sent her into the general population of the camp, where she mixed in with the other hundreds of small, malnourished prisoners.

By the time the Germans realized that she had been telling the truth, they were unable to figure out which of the prisoners was her.

Even with their leader captured, though, the Comet Line continued to ferry another 700 British soldiers to Spain.

Andre de Jong stayed at Ravensbruck for two years until the Allies liberated the camp in April of 1945.

After the war, she worked as a nurse at leper colonies in several African countries.

She passed away in 2007 at the age of 90 after a long life spent helping other people.

While that British airman may have worried about such a young-looking girl being the mastermind of an underground escape route, Andre's story is a reminder that looks can be deceiving.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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