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