Scientists have discovered several 518-million-year-old fossils that reshape the origins of the group of animals that contains starfish, and found that they ate their food using tentacles, and not passively using their gills as previously thought.

When public health researchers want to know whether diseases such as COVID-19 or polio are circulating in a community, they can look for genetic evidence in wastewater.

Entomologist Dana Price wondered whether the same principle could be applied to mosquitoes. The question led to an unconventional experiment.

“What we did, colloquially, was build a mosquito toilet,” said Price, an associate professor at the Center for Vector Biology, Department of Entomology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and a lead author of a study published in Microbiology Spectrum.