THE BUGS IN YOUR TEABAG COUNTED WITH EDNA

Yes, you are drinking arthropods in your tea.

Commercial tea leaves contain traces of arthropod DNA, according to a study in Biology Letters.

Aside from establishing that yes, there are insect traces in your teabag, the research demonstrates a nifty new technique: the ability to extract EDNA from dried plants.

Environmental DNA, or EDNA, refers to the DNA fragments left behind by many different species in a given environment.

It works best with samples of water. But a team of researchers based at Trier University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, both in Germany, has figured out a method for getting EDNA from dried leaves.

The researchers extracted DNA from several dozen different commercially bought teabags and dried herbs, including chamomile, mint, tea and parsley.

They were able to spot over 1,000 different species of arthropod from the EDNA they found.