Shortly after midnight on June 19, a team of about 30 scientists from Washington, D.C., and across the Southeast concluded a “bioblitz,” an intensive wildlife scavenger hunt, at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce. Over 10 days, the group collected and preserved more than 2,700 mud- and sand-dwelling animals from the Indian River Lagoon, considered by some scientists to be the most biodiverse estuary in the U.S
These animals, which included crustaceans, slugs, snails and worms, form a crucial layer of the food chain and are sentinels of environmental change. This makes them useful proxies for water quality and the ecological health of the Indian River Lagoon, which is still healing from a decade of pollutant-powered algal blooms that decimated seagrass meadows, triggered fish kills and starved manatees.
Led by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), the bioblitz is part of its first major effort to combine traditional natural-history collection techniques with an emerging technology known as environmental DNA to generate nearly real-time snapshots of a waterway’s wellbeing, said Holly Sweat, a benthic ecologist at the station and the bioblitz coordinator.
Environmental DNA, or eDNA, is genetic material shed passively by an animal, or “the dust of a species,” said Christopher Meyer, who leads the NMNH Ocean DNA Initiative. This material, which can be extracted from sediment, air or water, can act as a genetic fingerprint, helping scientists detect the recent presence of an animal, even if they don’t see or collect it…