An imaginative new technology could revolutionize the study of biodiversity and help save endangered species.
, serve as proof of concept for a tool that could revolutionize biodiversity monitoring and improve ecological decision-making. “We’ve demonstrated this can work, and it can work extremely well,” says Elizabeth Clare, a professor of biology at York University in Toronto, who led the British study. “What we now need to figure out is under what conditions does it work.”The air around us is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen and, surprisingly, some teeny fraction of a percent DNA.
Genetic material has been extracted from rain, soil and even honey. Bodies of water have been especially handy for surveying both aquatic and terrestrial populations. But for some reason, the burgeoning field has overlooked the stuff we breathe. Still, judging by her and Bohmann’s expectations, the experiments were wildly successful. At the start, the investigators were all but certain of complete failure . Instead, they found the whole menagerie. Giraffes, tigers, armadillos, ostriches — 49 species in Denmark, and 25 in England, detected in both sealed enclosures and open air. They even detected evidence of fish that were only used as feed for other animals. “It was just absolutely mind blowing,” Bohmann says.
That fluke highlights the promise of DNA vacuuming, which could more effectively map the habitat of threatened and endangered species — data that government agencies can use to defend the creatures against encroachment. In England, aquatic eDNA has helped save the great crested newt. “If we can adapt that for hedgehogs,” Clare says, “that’s hugely exciting for British conservation.
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