[ropeladder]

Wastewater surveillance is a pretty crazy technology. My neighbor works on projects using it for wildlife tracking, and they can get startling amounts of information about what is going on in a given watershed. What (e.g endangered) animals are present, what animals humans are eating, etc. And all the way down to the viral level, obviously.

[jdadj]

I’m confused. How is wastewater from endangered animals ending up in the sewage system? Surely they’re not using toilets…

[ropeladder]

Sorry, my comment was a bit misleading: as the other commenter noted, they are doing testing in rivers, etc. When animals defecate/urinate onto the ground, some of it eventually gets carried and aggregated into flowing water.

[londons_explore]

There is always a little that drains in... Often these tests are done on river water too.

And PCR tests are super sensitive.