I am a PhD candidate at UNSW Sydney, the Australian Museum, and the University of Copenhagen. Having worked previously as an amphibian and reptile keeper in zoos, I completed my undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Biodiversity and Conservation, at Macquarie University in 2014. The same year, I started working as a research assistant at the Australian Museum. Through that work, and in particular a huge (and as yet unsuccessful) search for a long-missing frog along remote forest streams, I gained an interest in creative techniques of improving the detectability of rare and elusive species.

In 2018 I developed a method of surveying frog species that are difficult to detect using invertebrate-derived DNA (iDNA) as part of my honours degree. The principle behind iDNA is that while some animals are very elusive, parasites tend to be everywhere. We can collect parasites, barcode the DNA in their bellies, and ‘detect’ their host animal without having to see it first-hand! I tested this for amphibians by broadcasting frog calls in the forest. The sound of those calls attracted frog-biting, blood-sucking flies, which flew en masse right into traps next to my speakers. Some of these flies had bellies full of frog blood, so I extracted and sequenced the DNA from that blood. Amazingly, through these flies I detected threatened frogs that were missed during traditional surveys at most sites, including one species that we never saw or heard at all!

Establishing iDNA with frog-biting flies as a promising survey method for frogs is just the beginning. My small pilot study raised even more questions: Just how effective is it compared to other methods? How does its effectiveness vary across species or space? What makes a frog species a good candidate for iDNA surveys? And how can detection success through iDNA be improved? These are the questions that drive my research, and I’m passionate about developing iDNA and other DNA-based survey techniques as powerful tools in providing those invaluable species observations that help us understand where species live, how they’re doing, and what their conservation needs are.