Usually they leave no more than blood smears; sometimes, busted engines and pulpy, feathery messes. Bird strikes, which occur when the flight paths of airplanes and avians suddenly intersect, can be costly and dangerous.
To figure out which foods are attracting birds struck by commercial planes at the Perth Airport in Australia, biologist Michael Bunce and his colleagues sequenced the contents of their guts. The scientists examined 77 avian carcasses collected by airport employees between October 2011 and November 2012, generating more than 150,000 DNA sequences.
With advances in next-generation sequencing, “for the first time, we can get into really complicated substrates, like gut contents, and get a really good handle on what things are eating,” says Bunce, who leads the Ancient DNA Laboratory at Murdoch University in Perth.
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