--- title: "We Filtered Sixty Litres Of Creek. The Unknown Reads Were A Vole." dek: "Environmental DNA picks up every animal that has been near the water. We sampled eleven sites across a watershed with a long sighting record. The lab found forty-one vertebrate species. The unmatched sequences turned out to be a vole." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Cryptids author: Sal Brindisi and Dev Rajagopal (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T11:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/bigfoot-edna-creek tags: Bigfoot, eDNA, metabarcoding, field work, method genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # We Filtered Sixty Litres Of Creek. The Unknown Reads Were A Vole. *Environmental DNA picks up every animal that has been near the water. We sampled eleven sites across a watershed with a long sighting record. The lab found forty-one vertebrate species. The unmatched sequences turned out to be a vole.* Every animal that goes near water leaves cells in it. Skin, hair, saliva. Filter enough water and you can list what has been there. We filtered sixty litres at each of eleven sites in a watershed with a long record of sightings. The people who report those sightings helped choose where. Forty-one vertebrate species came back. > **Figure:** What was in the water — see https://theyburied.com/article/bigfoot-edna-creek ## What "unassigned" means Dr. Marisol Kwan-Petrakis made us agree to print this before any result, and she was right to. Sequencing gives you fragments. The software compares each fragment to a reference library and names it. Anything it cannot match is filed as **unassigned**. Unassigned does not mean unknown to science. It overwhelmingly means *not in the library* — a species nobody has bothered to sequence, or a sequence too degraded to match, or a stretch of DNA that is identical across a dozen relatives. "Every time a newspaper runs one of these, somebody reports the unassigned fraction as a mystery animal," she said. "It is a mystery filing cabinet." ## Our unassigned fraction 1.4 per cent. Most of it resolved on a second pass with a wider library. The largest single component was a vole — a perfectly well-known vole, living exactly where a vole should live, whose reference sequence was simply not in the database we started with. A residue would not resolve. The honest description of that residue is *degraded sequence*, and Dr. Kwan-Petrakis would not let us call it anything else. > Unassigned does not mean unknown to science. It means not in the library. It is a mystery filing cabinet. > > — Dr. Marisol Kwan-Petrakis ## The bears Black bear at nine of the eleven sites. That is not a throwaway. Work comparing sighting reports against black bear populations finds the two track each other closely, which is exactly what you would expect if a large share of encounters are bears seen briefly, at distance, in poor light, standing up. Our correspondent, who has spent eighteen years on this beat, would like to add that a standing black bear at forty metres in failing light does not look like a bear. He has done it. He wrote *what is that* in his notebook and then spent ninety seconds being wrong. ## The four who helped Two of the four people who chose sites with us walked them on the day. Neither has changed their mind, and both said so carefully. One of them put it in a way our correspondent has been thinking about since. "You have tested the water," he said. "I did not see a thing in the water. I saw a thing on the ridge, once, in 1994, for about four seconds, and I have never said it was anything except that." Then: "I helped you pick the sites because I would rather know. If you had found something I would have wanted the same standard of proof. I do not get to only want it in one direction." ## Sources (invented) - Dr. Marisol Kwan-Petrakis, Molecular ecologist; ran the sequencing — Commissioned; fee $22,800, disclosed. Protocol published before sampling. (April–July 2026) - Washington state wildlife biologists, Two, named in our notes — Advised on site selection; took no fee (March 2026) - Four people with sighting reports in the watershed, Named with consent — Interviewed; two walked the sites with our correspondent (April 2026) - The full sequence data, Deposited in a public repository — Uploaded on publication (August 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2029: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2029 ## What we could not confirm - Whether a larger survey would find something else. Eleven sites, one watershed, one season. This is a small study and says so. - What made the 1.4% unassigned. Most resolved on a second pass; a residue did not, and the honest description of that residue is 'degraded sequence', not 'unknown animal'. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.