Extinct Pyrenean Ibex Cloned 249
jamie points out a story in the Telegraph about a project to clone the Pyrenean Ibex (known also as bucardo), a species that went extinct in 2000. Before the last known member of the species died, scientists took tissue samples to begin a project to clone the animal. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. " Now, for the first time, one of them has survived the gestation period, living for seven minutes after birth. One of the researchers said, "The delivered kid was genetically identical to the bucardo. In species such as bucardo, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance."
Re:HUMANS: - (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nature, red in tooth and claw. (Score:5, Interesting)
After enough adaptations and mutations, you cease to classify an animal as being in the same species as its ancestor. If these adaptations occur based on local conditions, then it isn't uncommon for the two species to coexist. No matter that they haven't evolved yet enough to invent taxes, death is still certain. And if the local adaptations make one species better globally, then you'll see competition and likely, the extinction of the ancestor's species.
You have to remember that the definition of species is vague, that the tree of life has many branches, and that inevitably, all branches terminate. So evolution constantly produces more and more species, and even when there is no branch, a large enough change will be considered the line between one species and another.
Evolution doesn't necessitate extinction, it's the semantics we use to describe it and the cold hard fact that you can't indefinitely sustain every species that has ever existed on Earth.
A few thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
For starters, I'm suprised with all the talk about cloning Mammoths and such no one thought to start with something simpler like the Yangtze river dolphin that went extinct just last year. Certainly there's no problem getting DNA samples for that. It's nice then to see there are scientific groups starting with something a little more realistic before considering moving on to the longer extinct species.
But here's my concern, it's not that getting DNA is the issue as such, the problem is getting enough DNA that's genetically diverse enough to maintain a healthy population. If we manage to get the DNA of a mammoth and bring it back then great, that's fine but what then? I'm not convinced we can get DNA from a diverse enough selection of a species to maintain a healthy population. Mammoths aside, do we likely have diverse enough set of DNA from the Yangtze river dolphin, our most recent loss, let alone from this Ibex which died out 8 or 9 years ago?
If we're serious about cloning as a technique to bring back extinct species, then the reality is we need to be archiving DNA from thousands of members of each endangered species now. A lack of diversity in a species brought back by cloning is simply going to lead to their extinction again.
This is a problem that's already affecting some of the flora that is close to extinction. We have in recent years lost (or very likely lost) species of flora from the wild but yet have them en-masse in cultivation. Perhaps a good example is Echnocactus grusonii, otherwise known as the golden barrel cactus which almost everyone will have seen as they can be purchased in nearly every garden centre worldwide. It's somewhat of a success story that the plant (which is pretty impressive) will be available for future generations to see, but it's also rather a problem in that most of them out there all stem from a single plant. As one plant can provide millions of seeds most nurseries will just take those seeds and plant them en-masse (usually in Spanish fields in Europe, but using similar methods in the southern US and China). Each seed will have some genetic diversity if cross-pollination occured between two separate plans but this by itself isn't enough.
To provide an example, anyone who has been to Arizona or lives there will know that it's a pretty diverse state in terms of climate and one of it's most picturesque plants the Saguaro cactus (Carnegia gigantea) grows across large parts of the state, ranging from some of the lower lying areas, through to some of the high er lying areas, now the problem is that those living in the hottest parts of the state, such as down by Tucson wont see temperatures anywhere near as low as those at higher, colder areas. Furthermore, some populations will be prone to suffering snow sometimes, and getting a lot more went and damp than others due to increased humidity in some areas and this is the crux of the problem. We could not take seeds from a population that has grown in the desert regions for thousands of years and plant them in the colder, wetter regions and expect them to survive as a population, therefore if a species like this were to go extinct and we only had viable seed from a specific region it is possible that they would be limited to that region, it would take thousands and thousands years for natural selection to select those hardy enough to move from that region back to the areas they previously inhabited, but during that time the reintroduced population is at risk due to the much smaller areas they'd occupy. Currently, many species are critically endangered for exactly this reason, they may grow in areas no bigger than a small village, and those areas are all too often at risk- a current example is Arrojadoa marylanae which exists only a small quartz hill range in Brazil that is currently targetted for mining of the quartz, destruction of this small area will lead to extinction of at least one, maybe multiple species of flora from our planet, and it currently doesn't seem to be that we have enough samples of this held sa
Extinct? (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose, for 7 minutes, it technically wasn't extinct!
Re:Nature, red in tooth and claw. (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is the fun problem with the layman's explanation of evolution. Unless you were trying to be funny.
The fossil record is littered with hundreds and thousands of creatures that have no direct genetic descendants. They failed, they went extinct, they lost.
However, quite a few other ones survived to evolve into the mass of life we have today.
Natural selection is based on extinction. The failed mutations die. Sometimes the whole failed species dies. But somewhere up the evolutionary tree, their second or third cousins twice removed were better adapted and survived.
It is pure arrogance to think we are the only creatures who drive this process. How many herbivores were eaten by tigers? How many carnivores went extinct their prey moved on or died? How many fish died simply because their part of the world dried up? How many diseases have wiped out hundreds of acres of trees - entire species have gone locally extinct in the last hundred years. Yes, we have a huge affect, but we aren't the only thing.
Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't try to mitigate our effects - if we destroy the environment, we'll be dealing with an entirely new mess that *we* didn't evolve for. But have some perspective.
Re:HUMANS: - (Score:1, Interesting)
Since there is no uified "we", those with technology should take steps to preserve species even if their current environment is destroyed.
The domestic cow is not endangered. We raise them, care for them, and harvest what we will.
Endangered species are more or less left to their own devices while humans rely on wishful thinking to preserve them. They should be raised commercially instead, There would be no risk of their depletion for exotic food, ivory, and bizarre gook remedies if they were raised in quantity.
As with the "War on (some) Drugs", the contest isn't "winnable", so policy should reflect REALISM instead of ideology.
Re:Where the hell did I "nature"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nature, red in tooth and claw. (Score:3, Interesting)
Domestic cats,dogs,birds
Vermin, especially rats, pigeons and cockroaches
Food animals
In many ways humans have become the dominant driving force behind evolution. While many many species have died out since we started worrying about it, we are also very close to spawning whole new branches of species that can survive extremely well in a world dominated by human kind. Give it a few million years and we'll know if our impact is positive or negative.
The simple fact is that we need to do what we need to do to survive and prosper. If that means that a minor, mostly useless, species of goat dies out then I can live with that.
A Dichotomy (Score:3, Interesting)
exactly my point. It also appears [austmus.gov.au] dingo ancestors arrived by boat 3-4 thousand years ago with seafaring humans.
Whether deliberate, through gross negligence or simply out of ignorance, humans have brought the extinction of various species whether directly or indirectly. Whether out of malice or simply out of cause an effect for an unrelated pursuit.
I'm not trying to simply denounce humans as "virii", but to show an interesting dichotomy - Humans have both the capability (or soon to be) to revive a species that was once extinct, and the ability to make many species extinct.