The Surprising Scientific Value of Roadkill
Scientists have used the sad reality of roadkill to study the spread of invasive species, track animals’ eating habits, and even discover new species.
Claudio Beduschi/Reda/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In the dark of night, a car on an Australian highway stopped in front of Christa Beckman, a bespectacled woman kneeling on the side of the road. She remembers the confusion on the driver’s face when he saw that she was collecting dead frogs.
“They were like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I explained. “It was fun to see all the expressions on their faces,” she says.
Beckman is a wildlife ecologist at RMIT University in Australia. At the time, she was studying how raptors eat frogs killed by cars and invasive cane toads. To get a complete picture of which amphibians the birds visited and when, he collected them in the wee hours of the night and placed them in sand-filled trays on the roadside. Then the birds would swoop down and take out their warty breakfast, and she would be able to see the footprints they left in the tray.
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While sifting through past research relevant to his work, Beckman noticed a pattern: Very Other researchers also used roadkill in their studies. His curiosity led him to recently publish a comprehensive literature review Describing the ways people have used roadkill – and in some cases, invented new research methods. They found more than 300 examples in which researchers made scientific lemonade from lemons: Roadkill helped them figure out where species were, acquire specimens more ethically, and even discover new species.
“I was really impressed by the huge variety of research topics that people were using Roadkill for,” Beckman says. “This could become a source of inspiration for other researchers.”
Some of the more common uses of roadkill in the papers evaluated by Beckman were to help scientists find out exactly what animals were present in an area, evaluate the presence of disease among wildlife or study the anatomy of animals. Christopher Lepczyk, a conservation biologist at Auburn University who was not involved in the review, says roadkill can show what was going on in an animal’s body at the time of its death. It has also been used to determine the spread of invasive species or even discover new species, such as snake In Brazil it is called a worm lizard and a rodent In India.
Many such studies do not need to use roadkill to be successful. But scientists including Beckman argue that using road casualties may be a more ethical alternative to trapping wild animals or euthanizing them for tissue samples. When using animals in study methods, researchers are asked to consider whether living animals can be reduced or replaced. “I think (roadkill) is a fantastic ethical source of specimens,” Beckman says.
Of course, just because roadkill is useful for science doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. Millions of animals are killed by vehicles every year in the United States alone. A 2016 study found that 20 percent of the world’s land was within one kilometer of a roadAnd researchers estimate that percent only grown up. “We have a huge network of roadways, basically guillotines,” says Fraser M. Shilling, director of the Center for Road Ecology at the University of California, Davis.
Schilling has no doubt that additional animal carcasses provide valuable research opportunities for wildlife ecologists. But researchers should explore roadkill only if it replaces potentially harmful or lethal methods of sampling animals, he says. According to Schilling and Beckman, the ultimate objective should be to protect living animals.
“We should use this resource from an ethical perspective if we can,” Beckman says. “But I would like that resource not to be available. I would like us not to see the carnage on the streets that we see.”
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