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I have a question about the common black beetle?
Will a colony of common black beetles strip a skull/bones just the same as a colony of dermestid beetles? I'm curious because I tend to run into black beetles more often than the more technical dermestid beetle. How efficient are they? I know that they tend to eat other insects, but do they also eat the decaying flesh of larger creatures as well?
This is the beetle I am referring to:
http://www.csotonyi.com/CommonBlackGroundBeetle.jpg
Everything I wrote earlier is still relevant to your original question. Regarding the photograph you linked to, I now understand which beetle you meant. The beetle in the photo is not a carrion eater and does not strip dead flesh off of bones, nor does it congregate in colonies. It is one of several possible species in the genus Pterostichus of the ground beetle (Carabidae) family.
http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/common_black_ground_beetle.htm
http://bugguide.net/node/view/33913/bgpage?from=0
http://www.entomology.wisc.edu/mbcn/field406.html
Ground beetles are beetles that eat slugs, grubs, maggots, caterpillars, earthworms and snails (among other similar creatures). They are considered to be beneficial insects. The type of beetle that does do what you asked about and does behave the way you describe is the type I wrote about earlier (see below).
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I'm not sure which beetle you are calling the common black beetle, but yes, there is a type of black beetle that strips bones of their rotting flesh. Some of the beetles in the Silphidae family are called carrion beetles (sub-family Silphinae) and others in this family are called burying beetles (sub-family Nicrophorinae). Both groups swarm onto carcasses of dead animals that are decomposing and consume the rotting flesh (or consume the maggots that are consuming the rotting flesh), leaving behind or burying the skeleton. These beetles are of special interest to forensic investigators. Because of the length of time these beetles spend in each of their various stages of development, examining the beetles on a decomposing body can tell a forensic investigator how long the body was there. The majority of the beetles in this family have some amount of red or yellow color in patterns on their bodies, but several common species among them are all black or nearly all black.
This Bug Guide reference has 18-pages worth of photos of carrion- and burying-beetles to look at:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/167/bgimage?from=0
and this article from Wikipedia has a lot of information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphidae
Google the genus names ("Silpha" and "Nicrophorus") for representatives of these two groups if you want to find more info on these beetles. Here is such an articles for starters:
http://www.puyallup.wsu.edu/plantclinic/resources/pdf/pls105carrionbeetles.pdf
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