Backyard Biodiversity March 23, 2019

Well its been nearly 2 months since I last posted. Apparently teaching a class in addition to a full time job, while starting a large research project, takes up quite a bit of time. Also it being winter it has been a bit hard finding biodiversity, so here are some pics of traces of biodiversity. I know critters are around, they are just harder to see and come by. 

The top pic is of some white-tail deer poop and the bottom pic is of some squirrel poop. I was actually pretty excited to see the squirrel poop, for all the years that my bird feeders have become squirrel feeders, I never really came across squirrel poop, until last month!

A lot can be learned from scat, the scientific word for poop. Most interestingly for me is the ability to extract DNA from scat , so that conservation geneticists can learn about a species they are studying. Plus, as we found in some of our work the amount of DNA released by fish, that can be picked up by environmental DNA (eDNA) methods , varies with how much the eat....and thus....poop.