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High-sort waivers, Lauren Summer here.

Elizabeth Claire took a really unusual trip to Hamilton Zoo in England a few years ago.

They have a lot of really lovely outdoor enclosures.

But probably the nicest scene was all the dingos.

Elizabeth is an ecologist at York University in Toronto.

And this entire pack of dingos lined up watching us out of total curiosity and jumping up and down,

trying to get closer to find out what it was we were doing.

That's because she and her team were standing next to the enclosure,

holding up a weird kind of vacuum.

We had a very tiny filter.

It's about two inches long and it's attached to a long hose.

And the hose runs to a pump.

It's kind of analogous that if you're making coffee and you had the water dripping through

and the grounds of coffee are caught on the filter paper, but the water goes through,

what her team was doing was collecting DNA from the zoo animals without touching them.

Because the DNA was floating in the air.

It's called environmental DNA or EDNA.

Environmental DNA is any DNA that you capture that doesn't come directly from the source.

So if I went to those animals and I took a skin sample or a saliva sample,

that's a direct DNA sample.

But this DNA is airborne.

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