How environmental DNA is giving scientists a new way of understanding our world
Frogs can be hard to detect, and they are not, of course, the only species that eludes more traditional, boots-on-the-ground detection. Thomsen began work on another organism that notoriously confounds measurement: fish. Counting fish is sometimes said to vaguely resemble counting trees — except they’re free-roaming, in dark places, and fish counters are doing their tally while blindfolded. Environmental DNA dropped the blindfold. One review of published literature on the technology — though it came with caveats,…