Everyday Environment Podcast

In this amazing episode, conservation biologist Dr. Mark Davis joins hosts Amy and Karla to explain environmental DNA (eDNA)—genetic material shed by organisms into their surroundings. This tool allows researchers to detect species in water, soil, and air without disturbing them. A fascinating look at how invisible clues in nature help protect biodiversity.
Highlights:
- Rediscovering the endangered salamander mussel in Illinois after 100 years using eDNA.
- Detecting rare Hawaiian birds through flower samples.
- eDNA enables faster, less invasive biodiversity surveys.
- Limitations include short DNA lifespan and data interpretation challenges.

More information
Illinois Natural History Survey eDNA

Questions? We'd love to hear from you!
Abigail Garofalo aeg9@illinois.edu, Erin Garrett emedvecz@illinois.edu, Amy Lefringhouse heberlei@illinois.edu 

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Creators and Guests

Host
Amy Lefringhouse
Amy Lefringhouse serves as Natural Resources, Environment, and Energy Educator for communities in Adams, Brown, Pike, Hancock, and Schuyler counties. West-central Illinois offers so many natural gifts to ponder, enjoy, and explore – the changing seasons, two major river networks that mark the borders and are the very heartbeat of the area, and an unfathomable amount of flora and fauna with which we coexist. From the tiniest speck of soil to the stars shining above, Amy is passionate about revealing these natural wonders to local communities.

What is Everyday Environment Podcast?

Everyday Environment delves into the intricate web of connections that bind us to the natural world. From water, air, energy, plants, and animals to the complex interactions within these elements, we aim to unravel the ties that link us to our environment. Through a variety of educational formats, including podcasts, blogs, and videos, we strive to foster a deeper understanding of these connections among the residents of Illinois. Explore more at go.illinois.edu/everydayenvironment.

Hosted by: Abigail Garofalo, Amy Lefringhouse, and Erin Garrett

Amy Lefringhouse:

Welcome to another episode of the everyday environment podcast where we explore the environment we see every day. I'm your host, Amy Lefringhouse.

Karla Griesbaum:

And I'm your cohost, Karla Griesbaum.

Amy Lefringhouse:

And we're so happy to be here today. We are talking about environmental DNA and biodiversity. So something really super interesting. And we've got Dr Mark Davis with us today. He's a conservation biologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey.

Amy Lefringhouse:

So welcome, Dr Davis.

Mark Davis:

Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.

Amy Lefringhouse:

We're so glad that you're here. This topic is I don't know. It's just very intriguing, and I don't know a lot about it. So I can't wait to to dive right in. So but first, before we get into eDNA, let's talk about a little bit just what you do, what your work involves there at the history survey.

Mark Davis:

Yeah, Amy, as you mentioned, I am a conservation biologist, and so broadly I'm really interested in trying to help conserve biodiversity. It is really important for a number of reasons. I think it benefits our lives greatly to have things swimming around and flying around and hopping around in our environment, and my goal is to try and protect that for future generations. And in my lab, how we do that is we use lots of genetic and genomic tools. And so we use DNA to help understand how populations of fish and wildlife are doing on the landscape and help us think about what sorts of solutions we can develop to try and make sure that these animals that inspired me and fascinated me while growing up can be around to do the same thing for future generations.

Mark Davis:

So that's what we do.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Cool. I actually I heard the term eDNA at the twenty twenty four we host an invasive species symposium every year, extension does, and they talked about eDNA within one of the sessions. And I can't exactly remember the topic, But it was just the first time I had ever thought about it, and they were talk I think they were talking about it in the aquatic sense. And they can see where specific species, if they had ever been there before, because they saw maybe some eDNA fragments or remnants or something like that. But so I can't wait to, you know, learn more about it today.

Karla Griesbaum:

I think in aquatics is where you see it quite often because it's so vast, especially when you get to, like, the marine level. And so being able to detect species with DNA is really cool. Mhmm. So let's get to the very base. What is environmental DNA, and how is it collected?

Mark Davis:

Simple question, complex answer. Environmental DNA, very simply, is that as all organisms are out in the environment, they're sloughing off DNA

Amy Lefringhouse:

Mhmm.

Mark Davis:

Just by doing the things that we do. And we can harness that DNA by taking large environmental samples and can capture that DNA without ever putting our hands on the animal. So, you know, this isn't really the things we see every day. This is really things we don't see every day, but we can tell that they're there because that eDNA is bound up in the water, in the soil, in the air, and we can grab onto that, and we can process that, and we can learn a lot of really important things from it. And the second part of that question, how do you do eDNA?

Mark Davis:

And it really depends on the context. You've mentioned water and that is the easiest way to go about it. And that's really where eDNA sort of rose as an emerging advancement is for invasive species taking a bottle of water, filtering it, pulling the DNA off that filter, and then telling what the different species that occur in that water are. But you don't have to just restrict yourself to water. The beautiful thing about eDNA is your creativity, your innovation, your imagination is really the only limit to what you can do.

Mark Davis:

So we're collecting soil from tortoise burrows in Florida to detect the endangered eastern indigo snake, doing the same thing for Louisiana pine snake in in Louisiana. We are taking air samples to detect pollinators in prairie habitats in Illinois as it's being carried along in the wind. Can use those same samples and document plant communities. All of these different things can be leveraged. We're, again, taking flower samples and figuring out what plant parasites and pollinators might be occurring.

Mark Davis:

And so all of these different substrates really act as eDNA samplers that we can take and then identify, whether it's invasive species, threatened or endangered species, or just getting whole communities. We can get all of that from a single bottle of water, a single cup of dirt, or even some dust that you trap in the air. It's that simple.

Amy Lefringhouse:

That's wow. Really yeah. That's really wow. It's a really wild thing. I'm thinking of water specifically and I I feel like like running water, moving water, and things like that.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Can it show, like, historically what was there? Is it telling us, like, when you're running these samples, are we seeing, like, history? Are we seeing current, like, state? Or what are in my head, I I always think of, like, water recharging itself. Right?

Amy Lefringhouse:

It's down. It's moving away from like its present location. So and so in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, man, I don't know what we could we could gather from that. Whereas I can think like soil sits still mostly, not all the time, but but talk about that a little bit more.

Mark Davis:

Flowing water is a great system. And in fact, in all systems, the, I guess, quote unquote half life of in environmental DNA is relatively short. There are so many things in the environment that is degrading that DNA. UV radiation is pulverizing it. Microbial action is chewing on it and breaking it apart.

Mark Davis:

It can be binding to soils through adsorption and it can very rapidly down in the system. And so we think that our sort of timeframe of eDNA is relatively short. In the best studied systems, if you're lucky, maybe it's a few days to a week, you're getting a fairly recent signal. Now that said, you bring up a really interesting topic, and that's something that we're looking into as well. For example, you can go out to a lake, and you can take sediment cores, and you can look at the different strata and use eDNA to look at how communities have changed over time.

Mark Davis:

But with what we're doing, we're looking at a much more contemporary snapshot. We're not going way back in time, getting back hundreds of years ago. We're detecting things that in flowing water systems may be a few days old. With our pollinators on flowers, it's even shorter because that DNA gets deposited and then UV is breaking apart really rapidly. And so the signal is fairly short which is a good thing.

Mark Davis:

We want to know what's there right now and not what was there maybe two hundred, 300 years ago. And so trying to get that contemporary snapshot is is really important.

Amy Lefringhouse:

How long has this technology or I don't know if I guess technology? How long have we been using this? A long time? Is this new? No.

Mark Davis:

It is a very new subdiscipline of conservation genetics that only emerged about ten, fifteen years ago. The first paper to do this was by a bunch of researchers in Europe that collected water samples to try and document invasive American bullfrog in wetlands. And it worked really well, and it's rapidly expanded ever since. There's been a proliferation of research in this arena. It has expanded exponentially in terms of publications.

Mark Davis:

It has expanded in terms of context. You know, my lab was the second lab to produce a paper where we collected samples, flower samples, and we're able to document pollinator communities. And that only happened in the first one was in 2019, ours was in 2021. And now there's been a rapid accumulation of research in in that in that front. And so it has been a very quickly developing study area because the old way of going out and sampling biodiversity is critically important, but it's time consuming, it's costly, it often requires specific expertise, different species require different gears, and it's very difficult to scale.

Mark Davis:

And so this method has been shown to be comparable in a lot of contexts while also being faster, maybe more sensitive, and more effective in transcending and cutting across all the branches of tree of life.

Amy Lefringhouse:

And you don't I mean, I guess it depending on what you're sampling and looking at or studying, you don't have to hand like, if you're talking about wildlife, you don't have to handle the wildlife stress out, you know, trap you know, stress those species out. This is a different way.

Mark Davis:

That's right. Yeah. Sight unseen, we can detect biodiversity. And we had a great example of that here in Illinois that just occurred last fall where my team went out and sampled environmental DNA for the endangered salamander mussel and mud puppies. They're these really cool species that live here in Illinois.

Mark Davis:

The mud puppy is this dope aquatic salamander that's swimming around in rocks doing its salamandary things. And the salamander mussel is this tiny freshwater mollusk that is also under those same rocks. I learned from my colleague Sarah Douglas that for a freshwater mussel, they're actually one of the most mobile mussel species, believe it or not. But what's cool is that their larvae are glacidia attached to the gills of the mudpuppy that then carries them around till they develop. The mussel has not been seen in Illinois for over a hundred years.

Mark Davis:

We sampled for eDNA. We detected it at one spot without ever having seen it for over a hundred years. We went back to that site, did conventional sampling, and we found it.

Amy Lefringhouse:

I mean, I saw that you found it, but I didn't realize that was the way that you found it.

Mark Davis:

That was how we found it. EDNA told us where to look, and we went and looked and we found it. And so that is the beauty of this tool is you don't need to have your hands on these things. And it gets to your previous question, like, how old is that DNA? How far is it traveling?

Mark Davis:

Not very. We found those mussels and the mud puppies at the very location where we sampled that, right at that point. And so you don't have to harm these incredibly imperiled components of biodiversity by sampling them conventionally. You can go out, can take a bottle of water, and you can learn a ton.

Karla Griesbaum:

That's so cool. It kind of cuts out the middleman for some things too. So I did research on funguses. You know, if you open a petri dish for ten seconds on your desk and close it back up, funguses will grow in it. And then you can do DNA analysis on that petri dish.

Karla Griesbaum:

But if you can just collect the air and find out, you know, the eDNA that's in the air, then that eliminates part of the process.

Mark Davis:

Can and do. I've been working with a colleague at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, Linzhou, where we put microfiber sensors in ductwork at military installations to see if there's pathogenic mold flying around through the air because it could harm our troops. Same idea as what we use to maybe sample pollinators in a prairie but deployed in different settings. And so again, you can absolutely do that. It cuts out having to mess with petri dishes.

Mark Davis:

It messes with having to deal with the unpleasant aroma of autoclaving agarose in petri dishes, and it gives you a lot of actionable information, which is really exciting. So again, our only limitations our creativity, our innovation.

Amy Lefringhouse:

When we're switching so we've talked about all the really cool things about eDNA. What are some of the challenges or limitations that we see? Like that we're like, oh, that might not work right. I don't know. I was thinking, you know with that salamander mussel you found it really close to where it is.

Amy Lefringhouse:

If species move really far around and really quickly maybe that might be a limitation but tell us what you see as some of the limitations here.

Mark Davis:

There's a lot of challenges and limitations and I think the biggest is being that it is such a new tool that the early research showed so much potential for this tool that everyone wants to jump to the end and just deploy it for doing things, and that's really valuable, but we've had to go back in a lot of instances and kind of reverse engineer practices because we just didn't know the best way to go about it. And so in addition to trying to use this tool to advance conservation of the biodiversity that I love and am devoting my life to protecting, we're also trying to figure out the best ways to do it because these can have consequences. We have false positives, so detecting things where they don't actually occur, we have false negatives, not detecting them where they do, and you're working in a framework where there's legal ramifications because of the Endangered Species Act or because of invasive species, that can be detrimental to advancing my goals as a conservationist. And so we're having to do a lot of work in the background trying to develop practices and establish these workflows. And so that's really hard when on top of things, there's just so much we don't know about what I call the ecology of environmental DNA.

Mark Davis:

So how the physical molecules are behaving in our ecosystems.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Okay.

Mark Davis:

How do they stick to soils? How do they blow with the jet stream around continents? How are they flowing through the water and depositing based on stream morphology? How is DNA from terrestrial systems cascading through rain events down into our watersheds and how do we harness that? How are these different factors like UV, microbial action, pH conspiring to break apart DNA to limit how we're able to detect it.

Mark Davis:

So building that body of knowledge on how the molecule itself is moving through the environment is an area where we've got a long way to go to realize the promise of these amazing technologies and methodologies. And so those are the biggest hurdles for me. Like, in terms of, like, squeezing DNA out of a liter bottle of water, that's easy. We can do that. But what does it mean, and and how do we optimize things?

Mark Davis:

And, again, how is it moving through our systems? That's really where the challenge lies.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Yeah. It's almost like you have to research the process, you know, in addition to actually implementing the process, which is super exciting on the conservation side, but researching and testing the process.

Mark Davis:

That's absolutely right, and you know that's the area. I've had a lot of sleepless nights thinking about sediment transport and how does DNA stick to high clay content soils like we have in some places here in Illinois, and what does that mean for detecting an aquatic salamander. Right? So that's that's I that is not my training.

Mark Davis:

I am not that guy. That's increasingly the direction that a lot of my thought and research is going into.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Right. This might be a dumb question, but so in order to match the DNA that we collect with we we have to know the DNA. I don't know what is sequences, whatever.

Mark Davis:

Absolutely right.

Amy Lefringhouse:

But do we have that bank of DNA for everything in the whole entire you know, everything that we can match something that we're collecting to, do we have that bank already there?

Mark Davis:

So I'll take a step back to answer this question.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Okay.

Mark Davis:

First, there's two ways we eDNA. First, and this is probably what you heard about with the invasive species conference, is that we can develop what we call targeted assays. These are genetic tools that will identify one species to the exclusion of all others.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Right.

Mark Davis:

And we do that by generating sequence data for our target species, and this is what we did for the mudpuppy and the salamander mussel. Right. Generate sequence data and then kinda analyze those and look for places in the DNA where there's variability, and that allows us to design what we call primers and probes that will only amplify the target species to the exclusion of all others.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Okay.

Mark Davis:

And in a lot of cases many species have sequence available in publicly accessible online repositories, but sometimes they don't. And in that case, we can get tissue samples, we can generate those on our own.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Okay.

Mark Davis:

Alternatively, what we do is called eDNA metabarcoding. And in that case, it's a very different approach where we're trying to capture broad swaths of biodiversity. And so we use primers still that we call degenerate. They have a lot of ambiguous base pairs, but what it means is that instead of amplifying one thing, it will amplify large groups. So if you're interested in birds, you can amplify all birds.

Mark Davis:

You can do all reptiles, all amphibians, all arthropods, whatever you want, and get large swaths of biodiversity. And that's where what you're talking about comes into play. Our ability to accurately describe whole communities of biodiversity to the species level, so what are the exact species that are occurring here, is absolutely reliant on how well curated those online sequence repositories are because we query those using bioinformatics to tell us, alright, this chunk of DNA matches up with This matches up with river otter. This one matches up with kingfisher. And so in places like Illinois and the Illinois Natural History Survey where we have something like a 160 years of biological knowledge, those things are really well represented.

Mark Davis:

On the other hand, I spent two weeks last year in Vietnam exploring some eDNA opportunities where in the jungles of Vietnam and in the Mekong Delta, they have a great deal of undescribed biodiversity. It's known to the indigenous communities. They understand them. We can work with them, but there's no sequences available. They haven't been described.

Mark Davis:

And so our ability to really finely tune eDNA in that context and in a lot of places in the global South is going to require generating those sequence backbone infrastructures to be able to realize the potential of this tool. And so my long or short answer to that long answer is it really depends. It depends on where you're at and how well sequences have been curated over time. It can also depend on the species. Entomologists, the bug people, have been great at generating barcode sequence data for all the species that they work with and describe, and so there's a ton of information there.

Amy Lefringhouse:

That's right.

Mark Davis:

For reptiles, different story. The sequences are all over the map in terms of which chunks of DNA from the genome are available. Some species are poorly represented, and so a lot of variability. But that is another one of the challenges is that our ability to do a good job of documenting entire communities of biodiversity is reliant upon these sequence repositories. And there's a lot of variability depending on where you're at and what species you're interested in.

Karla Griesbaum:

Mhmm. So along that same line, how has eDNA contributed to our understanding of how species are distributed and then how they use the habitats that we associate with them using?

Mark Davis:

It is advancing that knowledge in leaps and bounds. Again, because one of the attractive advantages of eDNA is that it allows us to cover a lot of ground really quickly without having to deploy a lot of equipment, without having to spending time handle animals. And so there are so many studies that are doing just that. I think the most famous that we've kind of been dancing around is EDNA really took hold here not only in North America but in the Midwest in documenting the leading edge of the invasive carp invasion. So as silver bighead black carp had been moving up the Mississippi River and its connected channels, knocking on the door of the Great Lakes, eDNA monitoring has really been the go to tool in our arsenal to document that leading edge and how it's spreading throughout our rivers and streams.

Mark Davis:

At the other end of the spectrum, it is providing an unparalleled amount of opportunity when we go to the other end of the spectrum, those really rare species. We work on in my lab with collaborators here with the Army Corps of Engineers, Searle Lab in Champaign, on the Louisiana pine snake in Louisiana. It's a threatened snake species that is the rarest snake in North America. And in addition to its rarity, its habits make it really difficult to sample conventionally. It spends 99% of its time underground in pocket gopher burrows.

Mark Davis:

And the old way of doing it is to to put up these trap arrays, and our friends in Louisiana, in a really good year, they'll trap one snake with thousands of hours of trap time.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Yeah.

Mark Davis:

That's it. Yeah. Well, we've been sampling soil from pocket gopher burrows and detecting pine snake. And so it is helping us to understand in this really rare, super elusive species where it continues to persist, what are its strongholds, and it's helping us target resources for better understanding the species. And there's just research study after research study after research study, all these different species that are doing exactly this.

Mark Davis:

We're wrapping up a two year study on these adorable turtles in Minnesota, Blanding's and wood turtle, where we've been using eDNA to track where they occur. And we're finding some really interesting things. Blanding's turtles seem like they might be doing a little bit better, they're a little bit more widespread throughout the riverscapes and waterscapes of Minnesota. Wood turtle, they seem to really be flourishing in very pristine old growth forest which is dwindling. And so in so many different contexts, our eDNA studies are doing exactly what you're asking about, helping us understand where and increasingly how much, and in the future what are they doing.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Mhmm. Cool. It's neat too, the habitat associations, but also you're talking about the pocket gopher the species interactions too.

Mark Davis:

Right. Yeah. We were really excited. We did a study up in Wisconsin a few years back looking at plant pollinator interactions. And our goal was really to continue building out our knowledge of how well eDNA performs relative to other methods.

Mark Davis:

So we were doing camera trapping in eDNA to document pollinator communities. But what we found kind of blew our minds, that yes, we got pollinators. We got bumblebees, we got butterflies, but we also got plant pests, so we got pest species. We found parasitoids, so parasitoid wasps that were laying their larvae in these plants to have impacts on them. We found arthropod insect predators on the same flowers where we found their prey.

Mark Davis:

And so we're unpacking these really diverse networks of biological interactions, not just pollination services, on single flowers, which to me is it it it was not we're expecting to find, number one, but it shows just how powerful this tool can be.

Karla Griesbaum:

Makes you feel like you know so little. Right?

Mark Davis:

It does.

Karla Griesbaum:

Let's be humble as scientists. Yep.

Mark Davis:

It does. And, we're not even utilizing it to its full potential in many cases, and we're just learning what all we can do because that's been an area that we've been expanding into as well. I work on a lot of species that are impacted by emerging infectious diseases. Now we do a lot of work, like I mentioned, on Louisiana pine snakes which seem to be impacted by snake fungal disease, a fungal disease that has emerged that is killing snakes, particularly our Eastern Massasauga here in Illinois. I work a lot on bats.

Mark Davis:

You're noticing a trend here. I like the species that tend to be a little bit maligned by Western cultures, but bats are awesome. They're also being impacted heavily by white nose syndrome, another fungal pathogen here in Illinois. So one of the things that we can do is not only track these species, but we can also see if we're detecting these pathogens alongside them And learn as we look across the landscape not only where our species are occurring, but are these lethal pathogens following them as well? To again maybe devise some strategies for mitigating of these diseases.

Mark Davis:

And so we can pair the stuff about, well, I'm interested in this turtle species with, well, this turtle is in trouble because of this disease or this parasite. We can track that in the same samples, which I think is super cool.

Amy Lefringhouse:

I feel like you want to be a student again and go like backwards in time and then like, oh my gosh, this field has just such so many questions that can be answered, you know, in this field. And it's just mind blowing.

Mark Davis:

Well, it's funny. I hope they aren't listening to this. My PhD advisors, when I was in grad school, I'd read that first paper about eDNA, and I brought up in one of our interactions, Hey, you know, it might be interesting to try some eDNA stuff, and they said, No. Hell no. It'll never work.

Mark Davis:

We're a genetics lab. We're not doing eDNA.

Karla Griesbaum:

Oh, my god.

Mark Davis:

And so they were they were nonbelievers at the time, but I think I think I've changed

Amy Lefringhouse:

their mind. I'd say you have. So you've you've mentioned a million different projects that you worked on. Is there any one project that like had the most surprising discovery that you were able to you know utilize eDNA and finding? Like one really surprise that came to you?

Mark Davis:

I mean, not surprising because of the technology, surprising because of the context. We got a hot one coming that we're working on right now. I got to spend a bit of time in Hawaii in the last few years working on And pollinator in Hawaii, there has been this had been this fascinating coevolution native bird species and native plants. And for a number of reasons, invasive species primary among them, these birds are on the verge of collapse as are their plant host species. But there are pockets of these birds that remain.

Mark Davis:

They're incredible animals and the flowers are absolutely gorgeous. And so, you know, we wanted to go see if we could detect native bird species using our pollinator eDNA methods. And this has again been in conjunction with a number of friends and colleagues, Jinelle Sperry, Mark Johnson, Aron Katz, my friends here with the Army Corps of Engineers. And so we spent a lot of time working on these mountaintops in Hawaii to collect eDNA samples. And we'd occasionally hear one of these native birds calling, heard rumors that there were some spotted at flowers where we were sampling, but eDNA is a little bit tricky.

Mark Davis:

How it's deposited by organisms can be variable. If it's deposited, it's variable. And so we just weren't sure that we were going to be able to document these bird pollinators from these flowers. So again, spent a lot of time hiking up and down the mountains, sometimes getting helicoptered up to the tops of mountains, which was amazing. And we come back and spend the cold Central Illinois winters processing apples and getting data out.

Mark Davis:

And we're now at a point where we've got data, and sure enough, we detected, you know, some of the rarest birds in America on these islands, showing that this tool can detect these species that would otherwise take an unbelievable amount of effort to see, we do get them through acoustics.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Right.

Mark Davis:

We are also able to compare that with invasive birds on Hawaii and look at how these plant pollinator networks may be changing due to the changes in communities. And so we're working on writing that one up and getting it published, but being able to detect those bird species was a pretty monumental thing for me.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. And being on in Hawaii. Whoo.

Karla Griesbaum:

I was gonna say that's your plug for science. Right? Listen. Work hard. Get it be a scientist and travel.

Karla Griesbaum:

Go to Hawaii. Go to Hawaii.

Mark Davis:

Multiple weeks in a Vrbo on the North Shore Of Oahu, the Yeah. Surf capital of the world, filtering eDNA while looking at the beach and seeing the sea turtles basking out there Right. Did not suck.

Karla Griesbaum:

Yeah. It's a good job.

Amy Lefringhouse:

And we talked about, it's making our field work more efficient, we think, but there is still field work involved. You're still having to go out and collect and do some stuff and be out. Absolutely. But maybe it's more inefficient.

Mark Davis:

Well, I think the beautiful thing about it is twofold. So number one, we can cover far more ground with eDNA than we can with conventional sampling for the most part. That conventional sampling is critically important. And so because there's a limit to what we can learn from eDNA. And so what I find is is one of the biggest advantages, excuse me, of eDNA is that now we can better target our resources to places where we get detections to then deploy conventional sampling and that expertise.

Mark Davis:

And so it allows us to be more efficient with that. It's eDNA should not cannot replace conventional monitoring because we can get so much more information than we can with eDNA. But what it can do is it can point us in the right direction, and it can better target our resources to those areas of opportunity. Gotcha.

Karla Griesbaum:

So do you feel like it's more of kind of a tool that everybody can use but not a specific profession? Like, maybe you're not an expert in eDNA, but everybody can kind of use this as a tool in their own world?

Mark Davis:

That's also been one of the exciting aspects of eDNA in that it has been a great tool to engage community scientists. We can send out kits with a hand pump, and someone could take a sample of water from the stream in their neighborhood, send in the filter that they put in an envelope with some silica gel that will preserve that for us, we can pull that DNA off and we can tell you what's in that stream. And so there has been an amazing amount of work in partnering with community scientists to do eDNA, that's the beauty of it, is it is super accessible. It's something that you can teach people to use. We frequently have workshops where we're teaching collaborators and colleagues who aren't geneticists but may be working in similar sectors to allow them to sample on their own and send us those samples for processing.

Mark Davis:

Community scientists all over the place are able to leverage this. There was a amazing effort last year, I believe last year, out of some eDNA ologists in Europe where they sent kits around the world on sample lakes across the world. My collaborator Eric Larson in UIUC NRES sampled some lakes right here locally, contributed to that effort. And so it's a great way to engage the public and community scientists worldwide because it is something that that people can go out and they can do and send that in, and we can get usable information and data from it, which is really exciting.

Karla Griesbaum:

So how do you get involved in that? Let's say me or one of my master naturalists want to be a community science in this field, what do they do?

Mark Davis:

Yeah. That's a great question. And I guess my answer is it really kinda depends. Typically, it's been associated with research projects where, you know, people are doing a study, and it may be remote from where they're located. And so beginning to develop networks to deploy these kits out to our community science partners.

Mark Davis:

My postdoc Jordan Hartman and I have a couple proposals in right now where we're trying to do this. And so for us, it's kind of opportunistic, but if there's listeners out there who are interested in this, hit me up. I'd be happy to chat about potential opportunities to get involved with eDNA, and we can co develop research questions and maybe work together to secure a little bit funding to do it so we can pay for the postage to send the kits out and how we process the samples.

Karla Griesbaum:

Perfect. Are there any other resources or programs to teach and, like, get information about eDNA?

Mark Davis:

Again, we're so early on in the sort of life of eDNA as a discipline that, to my knowledge, no. There's literature out there. There's some technical guides. USGS out in the West has been using eDNA for a long time to monitor bull trout, an endangered trout species, using community scientists, and they put together a really cool workbook that they send out to their scientists that will walk them through the process for sampling. So there's some of that out there.

Mark Davis:

I'm teaching a course here at UIUC. Unfortunately for students out there, apparently it's full. Was just informed yesterday. But we're starting to see those sorts of courses pop up that you can take classes in there. Plug for myself, I've talked bats and herps to the Master Naturalists here in Illinois.

Mark Davis:

I would love to do an eDNA session, so hit me up.

Karla Griesbaum:

Okay, I will. I will.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Well, as a as a closing here, doctor Davis, what message would you like to convey to the public about, like, the significance of eDNA and biodiversity conservation efforts? We kind of, like, started this. Like, you really focus on just you know, you're working on all different taxa. Right? So you you really are are working on, you know, biodiversity and the importance of biodiversity with the ed eDNA.

Amy Lefringhouse:

So what what kind of lasting message would you, like, wanna shout out to from the mountaintops?

Mark Davis:

Yeah. My message would be whether you can see it or not, biodiversity is is essential to live a good life. The things that biodiversity supplies to us is remarkable from pollination services. I enjoy me a tequila every now and again, and bats pollinate agave so that's why we have tequila.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Mhmm.

Mark Davis:

I have friends and family that have heart disease and are are on ACE inhibitors. Those drugs came from pit viper venoms. Our ag economy here in Illinois is absolutely reliant upon the pest services that our bats provide. Biodiversity is also fascinating, beautiful, spectacular. It enriches our lives, and I think it's important that we keep it around, that we know where it is, and I think that eDNA is providing an amazing tool for us to do just that: to understand where our biodiversity is, what's promoting its persistence, and how we can address those challenges that it faces in our world to try and keep it here for the future because our lives are better for it.

Amy Lefringhouse:

That's amazing. Well, I mean, really we thank you so much, doctor Davis, for being here with us today, and it's really inspiring. It really, I don't know, piques my interest at least with this eDNA work that you've been doing. And, hopefully, it inspires others listening to this podcast to learn a little bit more about it. And and as we kind of continue on in the future, we're probably gonna hear, you know, more more and more about it.

Mark Davis:

You're certainly gonna hear me talking about it. That's for sure.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Awesome. Well, we're so glad that you joined us on this podcast. We're really happy that you were here, so thank you very much.

Mark Davis:

Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Well, as with every episode, we end our episode with an everyday observation, kind of a roundtable sharing of observations where we highlight the mundane and the normal of our environment that is actually very interesting. So I'm gonna kick it over to Karla to share your everyday observation.

Karla Griesbaum:

Sure. So my everyday observation has to do with my kids in nature. So my kids are getting older. When they were younger, we were out in the forest almost daily. We just had the time.

Karla Griesbaum:

They they weren't busy. We weren't as busy, and so we would take them out to explore, and it was wonderful. But now as they're getting older, they're getting busier. We're getting busier with our jobs, and so don't get out as often. But when we do so we were out this past weekend.

Karla Griesbaum:

It's like everything shifts, and everybody gets along. My kids don't fight very much. I'm very lucky. But they're like, they just come together, and they're all interested in something. My nine year old says that she's not an outdoorsy girl.

Karla Griesbaum:

But usually about halfway through a hike, she's like, well, mom, actually, I'm really enjoying this. So I you know, sometimes it it does take a little effort to force them out there. You know? We're taking them away from whatever they were doing. Maybe they didn't get to see a friend.

Karla Griesbaum:

Maybe they didn't get to do whatever, but then we're all out there as a family, and it brings us all closer. And I feel like we all go home just feeling so good. And it just because we're not doing it as often, I really feel it when we do. Yeah.

Amy Lefringhouse:

I love that. I also think as adults guiding them and and pushing them to be outside more and more, they take that seed that we planted in them as as kiddos, and maybe they might move away from, you know, spending a lot of time in nature during a different phase of their life. But maybe back in when they are in a they're adults themselves, they'll see kind of that nature as a way to to relax and and have those core memories that they had with you.

Karla Griesbaum:

Feel safe there. Feel at home there. Absolutely.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Absolutely. Wonderful. Thank you. What about you, doctor Davis? What do you wanna share?

Mark Davis:

I I'm inspired by by Karla's comments, so I'm gonna go in a different direction than I originally intended I was gonna go in because I too have children, 11 year old and a 13 year old, who have long been my field assistants because they love biodiversity as much as I do, and we all have a particular affinity for the creepiest and the crawliest snakes and salamanders and those sorts of things. And so we have a beautiful opportunity here on the U of I campus because we have a thriving population of garter snakes. And so on Mother's Day, the boys and I took their mother out for a little snake meander to find some garter snakes on campus, and we did find a great deal. But it wasn't about going out and catching snakes, although that was fun. Was inevitably, as we're on campus, there are students around and will start asking questions.

Mark Davis:

And as snakes in Western cultures have historically been maligned, have been persecuted, it gives us all, and my children are great at this, at doing outreach and connecting with people about the importance of these snakes. And so they are so excited about it that they'll chat up people around who are asking, Why are you catching snakes? What are you doing? About, number one, this fascinating biodiversity that it's right under our noses on campus. There are students sitting studying for finals that had no idea that a garter snake was coiled up right next to them until 11 year old picked one up, and it sparked a conversation where someone that maybe didn't feel any kind of way about snakes or maybe feel negatively about it might have a different perspective when they see the smile on an 11 year old's face, and then that 11 year old speaks intelligently about the importance of snakes to our environment.

Mark Davis:

And so, you know, using this living laboratory that we have, this world that we live in as a tool to connect with people about the beauty and the wonder of biodiversity, I think it's always a great opportunity for us to have those conversations.

Karla Griesbaum:

That's great. And you're right. Children are great at outreach. I have a 12 year old that's also very passionate about the environment, and she just loves to spew off what she knows.

Mark Davis:

Yep.

Amy Lefringhouse:

That's an awesome story. Well, I guess I feel like I need to go down that same vein because well or just have a a a accompanying story about that. But my friend and I like to kayak, and we will go and look for mussels. Now mussels again are they're not like people aren't fearful of mussels or, you know, they're but they just are kind of like ignore not ignored, but they just aren't observed very often or they might just be, you know, glided over in the streams. But when we're working with them and looking for them, other kayakers and canoe people that are, like, coming by are like, what are you guys doing?

Amy Lefringhouse:

And then it gives you, like, that opportunity to educate those people about, you know, what you're what you're looking for and that there are that this many different mussel species in Illinois. And I didn't realize they all look different, and, you know, you're showing them the different shell shapes and colors and things like that. But, yeah, I think that along with kids with outreach, I think that adults sometimes don't take the time to be curious about things around nature. They don't maybe not just don't have the time or they just don't take that time. And once you're doing something like that, it really, they're like, well, what are you doing over there?

Mark Davis:

What you What's that?

Amy Lefringhouse:

What's that? Like, can I see that? So I guess I'll share that as my everyday observation just to kinda round it all out with with the same type of story. So

Mark Davis:

cool. Amy, I should connect you with my colleague here, Sarah Douglas. Sarah Douglas is the malacologist that I've been working with on the salamander mussel project. And every summer, she has a community science Mussel Fest at Allerton Park where people from all over come to slot mussels, and it is amazing. 10 out of 10 would recommend.

Amy Lefringhouse:

I have heard that it has a reputation. I have heard about that.

Mark Davis:

It's bit a drive from where you are, but you should come out. It's dope as hell.

Amy Lefringhouse:

No. It sounds amazing. It sounds amazing. Cool. Well, I thank you.

Amy Lefringhouse:

We thank you for being here again, doctor Davis. It was a joy. It was fun. I wish you well, and I wish you good luck on all your research and everything. I hope we get to talk to you again.

Mark Davis:

Thank you. Absolutely my pleasure to be here. This was wonderful. Thank you.

Amy Lefringhouse:

Well, this has been another episode on the Everyday Environment podcast. Check us out next week where we talk to Kevin Rohling. He's gonna talk to us about road ecology.