Nate, what comes to mind?

Dioxy ribonucleic acid?

Well, it's the hereditary material present in almost all living things, the very cradle of humanity.

Well, yes, that's all true, but did you know that it's also a key tool for conservation?

Mm, I get the feeling this is going somewhere really interesting.

Care to elaborate?

I am definitely leading up to some pretty cool science. Explorer

Dr. Natalie Schmidt is a real life conservation geneticist and in her line of work

DNA is everything. We use DNA as a tool to help us learn more about species that are difficult to study.

So we can take a skin sample or a fecal sample from an animal and we can learn about their movement we can learn things about their population

we can determine the abundance of that species just from the DNA that we extract from those samples that animals leave behind.

My real passion as a conservation geneticist is actually using genetic tools

to help us learn more about species that are difficult to study.

So rare and elusive species and particularly rare and elusive species that live in the

planet's extremes.

And when Dr. Schmidt says Extreme, she means extremely cope.

I became quite interested in trying to get down to the Antarctic because my great

grandfather, Charlie Sandell, he was a huge inspiration for me.

So he was part of Sir Douglas Morrison's Antarctic expedition from 1911 to 1914.

And I just wanted to follow in his footsteps.

So I was lucky enough to score a PhD with the Australian Antarctic Division and got to go down there a few times and following

humpback whales then went on to study the largest animal that's ever lived

...