animals are messy and they
leave behind traces of their cellular
material in any environment that they're
in
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we can think of water as the soup of
genetic material that's shed from
different individual animals from
bacteria and viruses all the way up to
larger organisms like fish and whales
similar to how people leave behind
fingerprints when they touch a table
surface
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so
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salmon and steelhead are important for
these coastal ecosystems because they
provide ocean rich nutrients back into
the ecosystems that they use for
spawning
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using traditional edna monitoring
methods we would have to go out to the
field site and manually collect those
samples
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the environmental sample processor or
esp is affectionately called a
laboratory in a can
but really what it is is this complex
robotic instrument that was developed to
capture edna by filtering water
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the automated nature of the esp allows
us to take a lot of samples and those
provide a good snapshot of the ecosystem
at a lot of different time points
over the course of a year we use three
different esps which we call
mo gordon and waldo to monitor salman
and species in scott creek
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they have a fish trap wear system in
place where they trap migrating salmon
and steelhead that move up and down
scott creek
and that allowed us to also get visual
observations of fish alongside of the
edna measurements
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we had to carry these 55-gallon drum
looking instruments on a narrow path
to our field site
the esp's run completely autonomously we
just hook them up to
the sampling water system
then we use a cellular network to send
code to the instrument to program it to
collect samples at a given frequency
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once the samples are returned to the lab
we take those filters apply some
chemistry to it and we break open any
cells or free dna that are on the
filters
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and then we use that dna and some
molecular tools to match those sequences
to a reference library or we pick out
specific dna sequences that we're
interested in
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so we collected 750 samples over the
course of a year that's a lot of samples
and processing those samples in the lab
is another bottleneck
if we could use edna and monitor these
systems in real time it would allow us
to make better more informed decisions
about conservation of these species
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you