Animals can be tracked by simply swabbing leaves

Biological fieldwork can mean trips to exotic places. But the work itself can be tedious, especially when you are trying to track down elusive subjects. The most common method is to send a few eager graduate students armed with camera traps and several weeks of spare time. But perhaps not for much longer. A paper published in Current Biology, whose lead authors are Christina Lynggaard at the University of Copenhagen and Jan Gogarten at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Germany, suggests an easier method: simply swabbing nearby leaves for DNA.