The researchers were able to detect the elephants' genes by sampling the air nearby.
IDA MARIE ODGAARD/Ritzau Scanpix is pictured.
Identifying where the species are living is a key part of protecting them. Researchers say they have found a new tool that could help.
"This is a bit of a crazy idea," admits Elizabeth Clare, a molecular ecologist at York University in Toronto, Canada. "We are sucking the genes out of the sky."
It works. A paper by the group of Clare was one of two to be published in the journal Current Biology.
A crazy idea takes off.
Environmental DNA is used to track species. Researchers have been using water to track aquatic animals for a few years. They were able to pick up eDNA from plants.
Stephen F. Spear, a Research Biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said that any environmental medium can harbor DNA that we can sample. The hellbender is a species of aquatic salamander.
The idea of using eDNA from air to track a large land animal like a rhinoceros or a giraffe was crazy to the lead author of the second paper.
A few years ago, the idea was thought up by the team. She was trying to come up with a crazy idea for a foundation that funds science.
I blurted out "No!" in the end because I was so frustrated. It has to be crazy. She says it has to be vacuuming animal DNA out of air.
She got funding for the idea and hired a postdoc named Christina. The team needed a device to vacuum eDNA from the air.
"We tried three different devices, and one of them was a vacuum cleaner, a commercial one," says Lynggaard.
It worked. They could use it to sample DNA, even though it was very noisy. A small fan, like a computer blower fan, was mounted in a 3-D printed housing on some home-made samplers. They were quieter and more power efficient. They will be more useful in the wild.
A tale of two zoos.
The team needed a good place to look for animal DNA to make the experiment successful.
We realized we are based in the Danes. Most of the animals are non-native, so they really stick out in a DNA analysis.
She says that if they detect a Flamingo, they're sure that it's not coming from anywhere else but the enclosure.
The samples were taken from around the zoo. They were shocked. rhinos, giraffes, and elephants are some of the animal species they picked up.
The rainforest house had a pond that was being used as a home for a guppy. It was mind-blowing.
Queen Mary University of London's Elizabeth Clare was sampling at an outdoor zoo park.
The team was able to detect 25 species, including the critically-endangered Eurasian Hedgehog. The zookeepers verified that there were animals in the area.
The two groups were close to submitting their work to a journal when they learned of each other's work.
I woke up to a flurry of text messages from my co-authors asking if I had seen another paper. The woman remembers.
The two groups got in touch and decided to publish their findings as a pair because they knew each other.
"We're independently affirming that this works to ourselves and to everyone else," she says. We both thought the papers were stronger together.
Is airborne DNA able to help track species?
There are many unanswered questions. For one thing, researchers aren't sure what the eDNA they're detecting is. It could be anything from skin to saliva.
She notes that there were some species that we never detected. She could smell wolves in the zoo park, but her group missed them. The team missed the zoo's Hippos.
Stephen Spear, a scientist with the US Geological Survey, says the current state of airborne eDNA is similar to when the first papers on aquatic eDNA came out.
He thinks more research is needed to show how air sampling of eDNA can be applied to animals that are smaller or more mobile. How does it compare to other methods? What is the best way to collect eDNA?
For her part, she is eager to answer these questions and develop eDNA air sampling into a cornerstone technology.
She says that she has a vision of samplers that are deployed globally that can suck up the DNA from all these different sources, from soil and honey to rain and snow and air and water. The goal is to have a global system of biomonitoring. We don't have a coordinated system for that.
The answers to some of the toughest questions could be in front of us, hanging in the air.
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