Charismatic mammals remain a linchpin in attracting publicity and funds for the conservation of native habitats and organisms. Unfortunately, the same animals are frequently scarce and dif®cult to survey. For many, con®rming their presence through faecal surveys is the only cost-effective approach. Here we show that, contrary to received opinion, expert naturalists fail reliably to distinguish pine marten Martes martes faeces (`scats') from those of foxes Vulpes vulpes. Moreover, their judgement fails completely when the animals and their scats are at their most scarce. This unexpected result from such a well-studied species has important implications for the monitoring of endangered mammals. We recommend that in the future, a multi-evidence approach should be adopted to monitor elusive mammals, involving DNA methods, cast hair identi®cation, camera traps, and non-leading`sighting' questionaires. For national surveys, it may soon become cost-effective to screen large numbers of samples using microarray technology.

SummaryWhile components of the pathway that establishes left-right asymmetry have been identified in diverse animals, from vertebrates to flies, it is striking that the genes involved in the first symmetry-breaking step remain wholly unknown in the most obviously chiral animals, the gastropod snails. Previously, research on snails was used to show that left-right signaling of Nodal, downstream of symmetry breaking, may be an ancestral feature of the Bilateria [1, 2]. Here, we report that a disabling mutation in one copy of a tandemly duplicated, diaphanous-related formin is perfectly associated with symmetry breaking in the pond snail. This is supported by the observation that an anti-formin drug treatment converts dextral snail embryos to a sinistral phenocopy, and in frogs, drug inhibition or overexpression by microinjection of formin has a chirality-randomizing effect in early (pre-cilia) embryos. Contrary to expectations based on existing models [3, 4, 5], we discovered asymmetric gene expression in 2- and 4-cell snail embryos, preceding morphological asymmetry. As the formin-actin filament has been shown to be part of an asymmetry-breaking switch in vitro [6, 7], together these results are consistent with the view that animals with diverse body plans may derive their asymmetries from the same intracellular chiral elements [8].

While it is widely accepted that most animals (Metazoa) do not have endogenous cellulases, relying instead on intestinal symbionts for cellulose digestion, the glycosyl hydrolase family 9 (GHF9) cellulases found in the genomes of termites, abalone, and sea squirts could be an exception. Using information from expressed sequence tags, we show that GHF9 genes (subgroup E2) are widespread in Metazoa because at least 11 classes in five phyla have expressed GHF9 cellulases. We also demonstrate that eukaryotic GHF9 gene families are ancient, forming distinct monophyletic groups in plants and animals. As several intron positions are also conserved between four metazoan phyla then, contrary to the still widespread belief that cellulases were horizontally transferred to animals relatively recently, GHF9 genes must derive from an ancient ancestor. We also found that sequences isolated from the same animal phylum tend to group together, and in some deuterostomes, GHF9 genes are characterized by substitutions in catalytically important sites. Several paralogous subfamilies of GHF9 can be identified in plants, and genes from primitive species tend to arise basally to angiosperm representatives. In contrast, GHF9 subgroup E2 genes are relatively rare in bacteria.