Environmental Detectives Use Genetic Tools to Track Invasives

Hunting for invasive species in the Great Lakes isn’t an easy task, because it’s incredibly hard to track organisms living underwater. But David Lodge, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative, says a recently developed technique called “environmental DNA” allows invasive species trackers to get a time-sensitive fingerprint of which species are living where—including underwater. Today, the tool is used to find marauding species all over the world.