Roadkill provide a novel way to sample an area’s animals

TRAFFIC AND wildlife do not mix. Anyone who keeps an eye on the verges while driving along a country road knows that. But such carnage does bring zoologists an opportunity. Counting roadkills is a rough and ready way of sampling local animal populations, and is the basis of so-called citizen-science endeavours such as Project Splatter, in Britain, in which members of the public report what they have found dead on the road, and where.Pablo Medrano Vizcaíno and Santiago Espinosa at the Catholic University of Ecuador, however, have taken the matter further by going out to look for themselves. And, as they report in , monitoring roadkill can yield information about creatures that are otherwise almost completely elusive.