Kristine Bohmann has a habit of using unconventional means to gather data. She once offered herself as bait to leeches in Madagascar, hoping to find in their guts the genetic traces of the animals they had been feeding on. If you want to know what species frequent an area, this leech approach reveals some information that simply looking for them cannot. But wouldn’t it be nice to skip the bloodletting?
Now Bohmann, an associate professor of evolutionary genomics at the University of Copenhagen, has developed a less medieval method of finding animals: Vacuuming their DNA out of the sky. Based on her team’s first experiments with the technology, it may turn out to be as practical as it is fanciful — using air filters to capture genetic material, they detected dozens of captive and wild species in and around the Copenhagen Zoo. “The robustness of that,” she says, “makes me ...
