Berkeley Scientists Plan To 'Jurassic Park' Some Extinct Pigeons Back To Life 209
phenopticon writes "Researchers at Berkeley are attempting to revive the extinct passenger pigeon in order to set up a remote island theme park full of resurrected semi-modern extinct animals. (Well, maybe not that last part.) Quoting: 'About 1,500 passenger pigeons inhabit museum collections. They are all that's left of a species once perceived as a limitless resource. The birds were shipped in boxcars by the tons, sold as meat for 31 cents per dozen, and plucked for mattress feathers. But in a mere 25 years, the population shrank from billions to thousands as commercial hunters decimated nesting flocks. Martha, the last living bird, took her place under museum glass in 1914. ... Ben Novak doesn't believe the story should end there. The 26-year-old genetics student is convinced that new technology can bring the passenger pigeon back to life. "This whole idea that extinction is forever is just nonsense," he says. Novak spent the last five years working to decipher the bird's genes, and now he has put his graduate studies on hold to pursue a goal he'd once described in a junior high school fair presentation: de-extinction. ... Using next-generation sequencing, scientists identified the passenger pigeon's closest living relative: Patagioenas fasciata, the ubiquitous band-tailed pigeon of the American west. This was an important step. The short, mangled DNA fragments from the museums' passenger pigeons don't overlap enough for a computer to reassemble them, but the modern band-tailed pigeon genome could serve as a scaffold. Mapping passenger pigeon fragments onto the band-tailed sequence would suggest their original order."
And after the pigeons get loose and take over.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And after the pigeons get loose and take over.. (Score:5, Funny)
Don't be silly, nothing like that could happen - the new birds will be engineered to make them unable to produce Lysine, so they'll be dependent upon Lysine supplements from their keepers. Stop feeding them Lysine and the bio-engineered birds will die. Easy-peasy. What could go wrong?
Re:And after the pigeons get loose and take over.. (Score:5, Funny)
Don't be silly, nothing like that could happen - the new birds will be engineered to make them unable to produce Lysine, so they'll be dependent upon Lysine supplements from their keepers. Stop feeding them Lysine and the bio-engineered birds will die. Easy-peasy. What could go wrong?
That's why Passenger Pigeons are the perfect choice. Clone a badass motherfucker, like a dinosaur, back to life, and any failure of the failsafes(which never are) makes you carnivore food.
Clone a dumb bird that suffered hundreds of millions of casualties against humans armed with 18th century technology? No problem. What're they going to do, lame you to death?
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No problem. What're they going to do, lame you to death?
No, they'll repopulate, and bury the planet in their droppings...
Re:And after the pigeons get loose and take over.. (Score:4, Insightful)
No problem. What're they going to do, lame you to death?
No, they'll repopulate, and bury the planet in their droppings...
Maybe they will repopulate North America, and in the process apply pressure to reduce numbers of imported, invasive pigeons.
That's not really a joke. (Score:5, Interesting)
... they'll repopulate, and bury the planet in their droppings...
That's not really a joke.
As I understand it the Passenger Pigeon once cruised the flyways along the eastern part of the US in numbers so great that, during annual migrations, they darkened the sky for days and whitewashed the ground beneath. Their extinction was met more with relief than unhappiness.
That being said, I've always thought reviving this bird would be a good idea. It is reputed to be quite tasty, raising it in captivity should be a snap, and if it does get loose and establish a pest-level wild population, it's ALREADY been wiped out once by human action so we have a proof-of-concept.
Others on my list for revival:
- Quagga. (Zebras are essentially striped donkeys that are essentially impossible to domesticate. The Quagga is a relative that is EASY to domesticate - and in fact was, until it went extinct because other equines became more popular.)
Dodo: A flightless bird that went extinct very recently because it had evolved on an island, had no fear of people, and had it's "lek" (breeding ground) located right where the military built an airbase during a World War. Big as a domestic turkey but allegedly much more tasty,not prone to panic so easy to handle.
Mammoth: Those went extinct a while back (some populations apparently by human action), but some in Siberia are frozen in permafrost and suitable for extraction of well-preserved DNA. Apparently these were tasty enough that both stone-age Europeans and pre-Columbian American Indians hunted them - on an industrial scale in the case of the Indians.
Re:That's not really a joke. (Score:4)
Dodo: A flightless bird that went extinct very recently because it had evolved on an island, had no fear of people, and had it's "lek" (breeding ground) located right where the military built an airbase during a World War. Big as a domestic turkey but allegedly much more tasty,not prone to panic so easy to handle.
Which world war? The were extinct before the Seven Year's War (aka French And Indian War, in the USA), in fact probably before Queen Anne's War (best guess in supposedly in the 1690s, according to Wikipedia), well before the first airbase, even according to Jane's.
Re:And after the pigeons get loose and take over.. (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen this one on SyFy. The scientists accidentally mix in their DNA with the pigeon DNA and we get a ruthless bird-beast that kills with bird-flu contaminated venom. Starring that guy in that show you used to watch 15 years ago and a hot 22 year old wannabe actress the producer is fucking.
Re:And after the pigeons get loose and take over.. (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen this one on SyFy. The scientists accidentally mix in their DNA with the pigeon DNA and we get a ruthless bird-beast that kills with bird-flu contaminated venom. Starring that guy in that show you used to watch 15 years ago and a hot 22 year old wannabe actress the producer is fucking.
I thought you were making that up but I looked it up and the movie is Flu Bird Horror [wikipedia.org], and I think the guy you're referring to is Lance Guest (aka Alex Rogan from The Last Starfighter [wikipedia.org])
Re:And after the pigeons get loose and take over.. (Score:5, Funny)
Holy shit I WAS making that up!
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The solution is obviously to "Jurassic Park" Robert Frost.
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John Conure will teach us how to beat them.
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Well, yes, it was a Unix system. IRIX to be exact.
These days, you can have it too [youtube.com] :-)
and then (Score:3)
Re:and then (Score:5, Informative)
Samuel L says (Score:3)
I'm tired of the motha-fuckin saber-tooth tigers on the motha-fuckin golf course!
This is pretty old news (not surprising for /. I guess) but there was a Ted talk I think on Monday and it was filmed in February. I disagree with some of the ad hoc de-extinctions they propose. Lets bring back the wooly mammoth. Okay, so how well is things working out for normal elephants? Do you really thing asia won't go apeshit for some mammoth tusks?
Lets say we clearly know it was humans fault that a particular animal went
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So you are saying it doesn't count because normal selection pressures and evolution could occur afterward? That's silly. Stability in the ecosystem is nothing but an illusion. A natural change triggering it is no better or worse than us doing it.
The right reason for doing this is because we learn from the process and the resulting creature.
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I was thinking, the Rocky Mountain Locust.
Then, after that, smallpox.
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I was wondering about that. Wife and I both have smallpox vaccine scars, but we're in our fifties. I don't clearly remember the process, but have a dim memory that it was really intrusive. I wonder, would a new smallpox vaccine leave such a scar, or was that merely a product of the technology of the time?
For the next bird to bring back from extinction, I vote for Phorusrhacids.
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"How about bring back some species of bees to try to reinforce those that may currently be in danger?"
The bees that killed all the dinosaurs, because they were pissed about the bad weather after the asteroid hit?
Time frame (Score:5, Interesting)
Signs are there will be some impressive milestones in this decade. Technically one extinction has already been partially reversed. The last Pyrenean ibex (also called a bucardo) died in 2000. A Spanish team used frozen tissue to clone a living twin in 2003, birthed by a goat. The baby ibex died of respiratory failure after ten minutes (a common problem in early cloning efforts). Funding dried up, so no further work has been done on this species as yet. As George Church reminds people, the first airplane flight in 1903 lasted 12 seconds."
From the FAQ - http://longnow.org/revive/faq-recommended-reading/ [longnow.org]
Re:Time frame (Score:5, Insightful)
The last Pyrenean ibex (also called a bucardo) died in 2000
...yet there's a media panic if the supply of Twinkies looks like it's in danger.
Priorities, people.
Re:Time frame (Score:5, Funny)
The last Pyrenean ibex (also called a bucardo) died in 2000
...yet there's a media panic if the supply of Twinkies looks like it's in danger.
Priorities, people.
Holy shit! I didn't know about this. So we've finally hunted the Twinkies into extinction? How may breeding pairs of Twinkies are left?
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Contrary to popular belief, twinkies DO have an expiration date....
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Have YOU ever tasted a "stale" Twinkie? How could you tell?
Stale Twinkies taste better. That and they bounce.
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The record is apparently 216 hours for the Rutan Voyager, that is, nine days.
Okay, if survival times for cloned species scale up linearly with flight endurance records, it still isn't great news for the ibex...
Screw Pigeons (Score:2)
MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
Thread over, you win!
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No, just "Walking on Sunshine"...
That's how you do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we could have started with saber-tooth tigers. But no, we don't.
Because this isn't a movie, and we aren't pretending to be idiots just to move a plot along.
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http://longnow.org/revive/candidates/ [longnow.org]
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Saber-tooth cats (incorrectly referred to as tigers) are on the list.
Please add me to the list . . .
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Saber-tooth cats (incorrectly referred to as tigers) are on the list. http://longnow.org/revive/candidates/ [longnow.org]
As long as their higher on the list than sabre-wielding-cats, which for the record, scare the bajeezus out of me!
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Thundercats, ho! [deviantart.com]
Re:That's how you do it (Score:4, Insightful)
Idiots don't move the plot, the "hubris" of not considering absurd coincidences and bullshit science move the plot.
Crichton hated environmentalists, but he promoted more magic thinking and anti-science rhetoric than all the worst tree huggers combined.
Is it a good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it a good thing? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't see the problem. Problems like these have already been considered by the experts [wikipedia.org]
When the pigeons become a pest, we just release some Bolivian tree lizards. If those become a nuisance, we simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards. If you have a problem with snakes, well, we've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. And the beautiful part of /that/ plan is, when wintertime rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death [snpp.com]!
See? Nature will find a way! So clone, my little mad scientists, clone like you have never cloned before!
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So they removed a giant sun blocker and laid down loads of fertilizer to spawn new growth in the sun. Yeah obvious pests there is no way that could have served a useful function in the ecosystem.
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Risks: Billions of these birds all over, i.e. nothing that hasn't happened before.
Yeah, but the environment is different than it was when those pigeons were alive. For one thing, with the automobile everywhere, there are vastly more targets than there were in their day. The thought of hundreds of million of cars covered in pigeon poop should scare anyone! Don't do it!!
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Read about the things --- flocks would _whitewash_ the ground in guano and would eat a significant portion of a field before moving on.
Here's how it all goes down... (Score:5, Interesting)
God creates pigeons. God destroys pigeons. God creates Man. Man destroys God. Man creates pigeons. Pigeons destroy Man. Pigeons inherit the Earth.
Re:Here's how it all goes down... (Score:5, Funny)
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Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitate lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, and as it always has, rock breaks scissors.
More FrankenBird than Un-extinction (Score:4, Insightful)
The short, mangled DNA fragments from the museums' passenger pigeons don't overlap enough for a computer to reassemble them, but the modern band-tailed pigeon genome could serve as a scaffold. Mapping passenger pigeon fragments onto the band-tailed sequence would suggest their original order."
Not quite the original, so not exactly a de-extinction. More of a new breed of Frankenbird.
Re:More FrankenBird than Un-extinction (Score:4, Informative)
" Its DNA has already been sequenced... The genomes of the two birds will be compared in close detail, to determine which differences are most crucial. Then the data and analysis goes to George Church’s lab at Harvard’s Wyss Institute to begin the process of converting the viable band-tailed DNA into viable passenger pigeon DNA... There are some 1,500 preserved specimens with extractable DNA."
http://longnow.org/revive/projects/ [longnow.org]
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Nifty! (Score:5, Funny)
Okay, I've read this book / seen this movie and know how this turns out so I've got a checklist for when extinct pigeons inevitably become terror-pigeons.
( ) Train young child on Unix
( ) Use old fashioned door knobs
( ) Get several big guns and don't store them in another building
( ) Make sure vehicles are ICE and not electric
( ) Redundant computer systems are good. You don't have good enough backups.
( ) Happy computer administrators are important when hosting terror critters. Make admins happy.
( ) The guy with the military training and the lawyer are always the first victims, get to know one of each so that you have warning
( ) Outhouses are bad
( ) Big thick steel doors are your friend
( ) Things can go wrong, that's what the lawyer and military training guys are for
( ) Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Add more power to Jeep.
Should I Welcome Our New Internet Overlords? (Score:3)
Give the problem to Google, Microsoft and Mozilla--the constant one-upmanship in this recreation could turn out to be interesting.
we should (Score:3)
What do you get... (Score:4, Funny)
Q: What do you get when you revive an extinct species of giant pig [wikipedia.org]?
A: Jurassic pork
OK, I'll get my coat.
I wish to complain about this parrot (Score:3)
It's not dead, it's resting! [youtube.com] (oblig. Motny Python reference...)
Fuck pigeons * (Score:3)
Bring back a mammoth.
* figuratively, not literally, please.
Boring (Score:3)
We don't need anymore flying rats (Score:2)
Why don't we find a use for all the city pigeons we do have right now. Make them tasty and I'm sure we can get rid of them within a generation.
Its easy to do (Score:5, Funny)
Inject the extinct DNA into a goat, milk the goat, distill the milk to get some stem cells of the extinct species out of it, put the stem cells into the kidneys of a mouse, clone the mouse 526 times, kill the mice, put them all in a BlendTec blender and whiz it for a bit, feed the muck to some chickens who will eventually hatch the extinct pigeons, market a new line of extra crispy "chicken" at KFC.
I mean is so freakin obvious how to do this kind of stuff I am not sure why we don't revive all extinct species in this way.
Why not choose a more appealing subject? (Score:2)
If you are going to expend those resources why not pick something more desirable?
Bring Lindsey Lohan back to life and keep her/them away from Hollywood, for instance.
And whatever happened to the effort to reconstruct the auroch? I'd really like to see them.
No worse than this crime (Score:2)
What utter idiots. Starlings suuuuuuuuuuuck.
Grammar (Score:2)
Please don't do it. (Score:2)
Next-generation (Score:3)
"Using next-generation sequencing..."
I see what you did there.
Golden opportunity (Score:2)
They will be unable to breed (Score:5, Interesting)
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], attempts at preserving the last surviving Passenger Pigeons in the late 1800s failed because these birds only breed in extremely large groups. So unless they clone about 10,000 of them in one go, there won't be enough of them to prevent re-extinction.
Pigeons, of course! (Score:2)
Because we don't have enough of THOSE!
AWESOME (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, yes, yes, OH GOD YES!
I've been wanting to eat one of these birds for DECADES! A bird so tasty, we hunted it to extinction!
There are recipes I wanted to try! Pies and stews and just cooked in the oven. They should do a kickstarter, I'd kick in!
Will They Even Behave the Same? (Score:3)
Why not choose a nice bird? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I'd like to restore an extinct species, this sort of thing is outright irresponsible.
As irresponsible as wiping them out without thinking of the ramifications?
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
While I'd like to restore an extinct species, this sort of thing is outright irresponsible.
As irresponsible as wiping them out without thinking of the ramifications?
What about the ramifications of bringing an extinct bird back to life that was adapted to thrive in a much different environment than exists today? Are its natural predators still around or will the passenger pigeon take over and push out other species (not to mention causing crop and tree damage)?
http://www.si.edu/encyclopedia_Si/nmnh/passpig.htm [si.edu]
Because the passenger pigeon congregated in such huge numbers, it needed large forests for its existence. When the early settlers cleared the eastern forests for farmland, the birds were forced to shift their nesting and roosting sites to the forests that still remained. As their forest food supply decreased, the birds began utilizing the grain fields of the farmers. The large flocks of passenger pigeons often caused serious damage to the crops, and the farmers retaliated by shooting the birds and using them as a source of meat. However, this did not seem to seriously diminish the total number of birds.
Has anyone asked Jeff Goldblum [imdb.com] to weigh in?
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are its natural predators still around
Well the one that made it an extinct species in less than 25 years is. We're also more prevalent than ever and could probably do it more efficiently now too.
or will the passenger pigeon take over and push out other species (not to mention causing crop and tree damage)?
Unless they are much different than current pigeons, I think bridges and building are in more danger.
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
or will the passenger pigeon take over and push out other species (not to mention causing crop and tree damage)?
Unless they are much different than current pigeons, I think bridges and building are in more danger.
Well, that's kind of the problem with bringing back an extinct species - you don't really know how will behave in the current environment until you bring it back. At first it's declared an endangered/protected species, and it starts to grow... flocks of thousands of birds in the air show the success of the program. Then the flocks grow millions, people start to complain about crop damage as the flocks grow to 100's of millions, putting entire forests are at risk.
It took man 25 years to drive them to extinction (and that's when he had the help from natural predators the had evolved to keep the birds in check), even if it "only" takes 10 years the next time, there's a lot of damage that could be done in the meantime. Plus, man may overshoot the mark and drive other species to extinction in their drive to control the passenger pigeon.
Sometimes it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
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We have the same problem right now with Snow Geese. They are a waterfowl that we thought needed protection. So we protected them. Now there are so many of them, they are overpopulating summer breeding grounds in Canada. So much so, that they are the only species of migratory waterfowl that has it's own hunting season at the end of the regular waterfowl season with no bag limit and all the other regular waterfowl season restrictions loosened. (You can use electronic calls, no shell limits, unplugged sho
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA there were over 1 billion of them in 1890 and then went extinct by 1914. You really think their natural predators have now all evolved to ignore them?
Some of their natural predators are now endangered [endangeredwolfcenter.org] themselves [edu.pe.ca]. Some of them are also known to be a nuisance [latimes.com] to humans. Do you really want to give them an unlimited food source? Maybe the birds won't be a problem, but the rise of predators will be.
And are you sure that the predators can reproduce fast enough to keep up with the growth of pigeons?
And what happens to the ecosystems that are taken over by the expanding population of new predators (and the predators of the predators?)? And what happens to the new predator population if the pigeons are eradicated again?
This country is much different than it was 100 years ago, so maybe the birds will no longer thrive and it's a non-issue. Or maybe the easy access to crops and current lack of predators will let them grow to even greater numbers than before.
"I don't know why she swallowed the fly"
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However, there are about 80 million pet cats in the US, and an estimated 50-60 million feral cats. Perfectly evolved hunters, largely immune to fluctuations in food availability, which the passenger pigeon didn't co-evolve with.
Wolves are an counter-example to your overreaction. They have been reintroduced to the US, and reintroducing a top predator is a hell of a lot more risky than reintroducing a pigeon. Broadly, reintroductions just don't cause the problems you claim and either dramatically improve thin
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" I think bridges and building are in more danger."
Thank god you're not a statue.
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
" I think bridges and building are in more danger."
Thank god you're not a statue.
Don't Blink.
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:what could go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
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Are its natural predators still around or will the passenger pigeon take over and push out other species (not to mention causing crop and tree damage)?
Don't worry, we can bring that stuff back, too!
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Well, no, he's looking at using recovered DNA to create a hybrid with a modern species - which is indeed a genetically modified organism. (And is pretty much what was being discussed in Jurassic Park, stripped of the sensational and thriller elements. Well, and the mosquitos preserved in amber.)
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Maybe we could train the Passenger Pigeons to fight the Canada Geese. Win-win!
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Sure, put ify in front of any noun and you can verbify it.
Re:This method won't resurrect knowledge. (Score:4, Informative)
How do you resurrect a species learnt abilities and knowledge ? Okay birds look like pre-programmed robots, but saying things like "extinction is forever is just nonsense" is wrong. Numerous species pass their hunting, social, swimming or hiding knowledge from parents to children. In fact, even birds learn singing from listening to those of their kind.
Actually, i think when you resurrect a species, you just engineer a new one using pieces of stuff drawn from existing material ; lost knowledge is lost forever.
This has proven to be a problem, even (perhaps especially) with birds. Great efforts have been made to captive-breed Thick-Billed parrots, and reintroduce them to their former, southern USA habitat. The released birds typically starve. They have a very specific diet, and they don't have other birds in the wild to show them how to find it.
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They have over 1000 stuffed pidgeons though. Assuming only half of them have extractable dna (a very pessimistic figure), even if a single stuffed corpse is missing a viable gene sequence, there are 499 other birds that might have the missing section. Odds are good that they will be able to assemble a few "complete bibles" from the patched together scraps.
The long term issue I see is genetic bottlenecking, like what currently plagues the cheetah. 1000 COMPLETE copies is the bare minimum, assuming that all s
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The basic gist is that any dinosaur DNA would be completely degraded. DNA has a half-life of 521 years with variations based on environmental conditions. A 2012 study showed that DNA would degrade past the point that we could read anything useful out of it after 1.5 million years, and would degrade completely after 6.8 million, and those are under optimal conditions. The Jurassic period ended 145 million years ago.
Source: http://m.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/scientists-dash-hopes-for-din [mnn.com]