Coming Back Soon... The Tasmanian Tiger?

adoll writes: "Melbourne's The Age is reporting that DNA has been extracted from a 110 year old Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) bone. Scientists are now wondering if genes can be implanted into eggs of an existing species and born to surrogate mothers (numbat and Tasmanian devil are mentioned as possible hosts). The last tiger died in Hobart, Tasmania on September 9, 1936. It was believed the tigers were hunted to extinction (CD: Thems was good eatin) on Tasmania, but unconfirmed sighting have persisted to this day".

Comments

Founder Effect is a possible problem

[Buran]

The founder effect, which is the sharp reduction in the genetic variety of a population when it arises from a very small group of individuals (Iceland is an excellent example), has a great potential to be a problem here. The cheetah, for example, went through a bottleneck at some point in the past (no one knows why). Individual cheetahs are so genetically similar that organs (such as skin) can be transplanted between individuals with little or no rejection.

Unless samples from multiple thylacines can be retrieved and successfully used to clone infants, these animals will always be sucsceptible to being wiped out by a plague (since they all have the same genotype.)

And that's to say nothing of the issues with captive-raised animals that have none of the instincts that their wild counterparts would. For example, falcons that have imprinted on humans (and think they're human as a result) cannot be released into the wild -- it would be disastrous. They would never fear humans and would be unable to hunt to feed themselves.

The Tasmanian environmental record

[ynotds]

I'm not into conspiracy theories but for those of you who might be:

• Tasmania has a long history of electing Greens so in 1998 our "major parties" put aside their pretentions of difference and attempted to send the Greens extinct by reducing the number of state poiticians.
• More than fifty years before the last thylacine died in captivity, the last full blood Tasmanian aborigine died, a race that had been isolated from the rest of humanity for more than ten thousand years.
• Thirty years ago, the Tasmanian environmental movement was galvanised by the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to stop the then all-powerful Hydro Electic Commission from building a dam which would drown the remote and ultimately iconic original Lake Pedder. Proposals to drain the dam and restore the original lake persist.
• A decade later, a similar campaign against the proposed Gordon below Franklin dam was successful and South West Tasmania gained World Heritage recognition, including the aboriginal art in Fraser Cave named for our then Prime Minister in an attempt to enhance his environmental awareness.
• In the last few months it looks as though another predator, the fox, might be trying to get established in Tasmania. I'm sure I heard a report of some more recent evidence that they may indeed have a breeding population which defies thinking about given today's level of environmental awareness.
• The Tasmanian government recently retreated from its undertaking to support the outcome of the Tasmania Together process with respect to the unpopular logging of old growth forests to support huge (by Tasmanian standards earnings from wood chip export.
• On the other side of Bass Strait, there is growing environmental opposition to the Basslink Project to connect the Tasmanian electrical grid to the Australian mainland grid.

Now I just have to wonder whether the foxes or the politicians will utilise cloning first? My own fondest memory of Tassie was diving with dolphins at Flinders Island, a day I would like to clone.