Insights

Communication and Technology news

Tracking Wildlife With Nothing But Blood-Filled Flies

04/06/2013

Why bother with the long, hard work in the wilderness looking for rare animals when you can just trap some flies, pump their stomachs, (...)
Why with the long, hard work in the wilderness looking for rare when you can just trap some flies, pump their stomachs, and get a genetic picture of what they’ve been feeding on? If you’re searching for Jentink’s duiker, the critically endangered antelope species in Africa, good luck. Only 3,500 individuals are believed to survive in the wild. You might as well find a unicorn. But a Jentink’s duiker is exactly what researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany found last year, along with dozens of other species, using a new field technique to survey mammals in the wild: flesh-eating flies. Inspired by the way leeches carry around genomic evidence of their past meals, the researchers trekked to Cote d’Ivoire and Madagascar to catch and pulverize 201 carrion to extract any mammalian DNA lurking in their bodies. By decoding the DNA from bugs’ last bloody meals, they found 22 species in Cote d’Ivoire and four in Madagascar across a spectrum of ecological niches. The yielded a cheap, lightening quick snapshot of local mammal diversity. Mammal species identified including African palm civet, shrews, mangabey monkeys, chimpanzees and a signficant share of the local primate diversity. The researchers, publishing in the journal Molecular Ecology, say carrion "represent an extraordinary and thus far unexploited resource of mammal DNA."Read Full Story    
fliestheiranimalsbother

Do you need a professional solution for Email Marketing? We recommend AWeber Pro!

More details