Wildlife Surveys Out of Thin Air

Capturing genetic material in water, air, or parasitic blood samples can be used to noninvasively tally the wildlife in an area.

Biology Ecology Genetics Zoology

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May-June 2023

Volume 111, Number 3
Page 152

DOI: 10.1511/2023.111.3.152

In 2022, Nina Garrett of York University and her colleagues stood outside of a classroom that they were using as a makeshift field lab in Belize. Filters they had made using jerry-rigged computer fans sucked in air, trapping dust, hair, shed skin cells, and other particles on HVAC filter material. Later, they processed the samples collected on the filter, amplified the tiny DNA strands using a process called PCRpolymerase chain reaction, a foundational innovation in genetics—and matched the samples to a reference library. Using these simple fans and filters, the team was able to determine that many species of bats had been in this classroom, including Jamaican fruit-eating bats and ghost-faced bats. There were also kinkajou, long-tailed arboreal carnivores related to raccoons, detected in the classroom. And horses. And eastern small-footed bats, which are endangered and found only as far south as central Arkansas, more than 2,000 kilometers away. What in the world were such animals doing in that classroom? Garrett and her colleagues had been working to assess how well their method detected animals that they knew had recently been there as part of their field study, but they found much more than they’d bargained for.

Courtesy of Andrew Tilker (IZW)

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