Endangered Sheep Cloned

JoeyPea writes "Italian scientists have successfully cloned an endangered sheep, called the European mouflon, which is found in Sardinia, Corsica and Cyprus. A domestic sheep was used as a surrogate. This marks the first time an endangered mammal has been cloned and survived past birth."

Comments

Re:Rescuing species

[cmowire]

The main thing is that we can also collect cell samples over time to return some biodiveristy later on.

The advantage to cloning a dead nearly-extinct animal is that you return that dead animal's genes back into the pool. This can preserve the status quo. Over time, if we DNA-bank merely troubled species before they are even midly or severely in danger of extinction, we can give species a little more diversity to prevent them from dying out, once the situation gets critical. Captive breeding programs often have 100-200 specimens left to work with. If we also have 1000-2000 old DNA samples from when the animal was more frequent, that might mean the difference between extinction and survival.

The danger here is that we really do not fully understand the cloning process. If we carelessly apply these techniques to endangered species, we could hasten their decline. What if the clones cary some factor we don't quite understand, created by cloning, that makes them too weak to survive in the wild. Given the rules of gene flow, it can quickly cripple the species.