Animals can be tracked by simply swabbing leaves

Biological fieldworkDNADNADNADNADNA can mean trips to exotic places. But the work itself can be tedious, especially when you are trying to track down elusive subjects. The most common method is to send a few eager graduate students armed with camera traps and several weeks of spare time. But perhaps not for much longer. A paper published in , whose lead authors are Christina Lynggaard at the University of Copenhagen and Jan Gogarten at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Germany, suggests an easier method: simply swabbing nearby leaves for .The in question is called “environmental ” (e for short). It refers to all the genetic information that animals shed as they go about their daily business: breathing, urinating, moving around, or interacting with their environment in any way. In recent years gene-sequencing technology has become quick and sensitive enough to pick out genetic sequences from particular animals—including humans—from this ubiquitous e.