Tag Archives: detection

Using eDNA to Avoid Being Eaten on the Job

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Image Credit: pxfuel, CC0 1.0, Image Cropped

Monitoring the silver carp invasion in Africa: a case study using environmental DNA (eDNA) in dangerous watersheds (2020) Crookes et al., NeoBiota, http://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.56.47475

The Crux

One thing the last two months have taught us all is that testing for a problem is crucial. The earlier you catch a problem, the more of a chance you have to stop that problem spreading. Coronavirus is one example, invasive species is another. Detecting an invader arriving early on means you can potentially remove it before it has become properly established, saving millions of dollars down the line.

But often testing isn’t practical. Take freshwater environments. Sometimes a river may be hard to get to. Sometimes it may be infested with crocodiles and hippos. Makes regular testing methods like electrofishing or gillnetting a bit tricky.

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Dragon Guts in the City

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Image Credit: Aravindhanp, CC BY-SA 3.0, Image Cropped

City life alters the gut microbiome and stable isotope profiling of the eastern water dragon (Intellagama lesueuriii) (2019) Littleford-Colquhoun, Weyrich, Kent & Frere, Molecular Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15240

The Crux

It’s a pretty fair call to assume that if you build a city on a species’ habitat, it might be a little miffed. Yet as human settlements expand worldwide, many species are showing that they’re able to make rapid changes to their biology to adapt to living around humans.

This includes their diet, of course. As diets shift, many other aspects of a species’ biology follows, including the microbes that live in a species’ gut. And gut microbes influence a huge range of factors, including immunology, development, and general health. The response of a gut microbe community (the gut microbiome) to a new diet can in turn affect an animal’s ability to adapt to that environment.

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Mapping Species Distribution with Citizen Science

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 Community, or citizen, science is a huge, often untapped data source for ecologists. So what are the pitfalls of using it? (Image Credit: Jacob W. Frank, NPS, Public Domain Mark 1.0, Image Cropped)

Occupancy models for citizen-science data (2018) Altwegg & Nichols, Advances in Modelling Demographic Processes, 10, p. 8-21

The Crux

Species distributions maps are great. I remember rifling through animal encyclopedias as a kid, checking out the distributions of my favourite animals, just assuming that people knew exactly where to find all these organisms. But the reality is that figuring out exactly where species live is extremely difficult.

It’s made easier, however, by the use of citizen (or community) science. This occurs when volunteers involve themselves in projects in which they observe and report the presence or absence of a species in a given area, which is then used to determine a species’ distribution. This data is obviously incredibly useful to any ecologist, but it comes with some drawbacks. This paper attempts to summarise those drawbacks and outline ways to work around them.

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