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Bits of Tassie Tiger Brought Back from Extinction
zerobeat writes "Scientists from Melbourne, Australia have managed to resurrect the gene responsible for the development of cartilage and bone from the now extinct Tasmanian Tiger. The gene was expressed in a mouse embryo so the full reincarnation of a full Tassie Tiger is a long way off. You can listen to an MP3 of ABC Australia's Robyn Williams discussing the results with the lead scientists. This is the first time DNA from an extinct species has been made to live again in a live animal."
In Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park , the dinosaur DNA extracted from the stomachs of mosquitos trapped in amber is incomplete as well, but by combining it with the DNA of modern reptiles, a decent simalcrum of a dinosaur could be had. Does this Tasmanian tiger development vindicate (at least the less out there elements of) Crichton's plot?
I for one do NOT welcome our new tasmanian mouse overlords.
On a more serious note, it would be fascinating if they could bring back a few recently extinct species. DNA degrades quite a bit over time though, so any hopes of a real life 'Jurassic Park' are probably going to remain science fiction forever.
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until some renegade security geek disables the electric fence, and T-Rex's start eating attorneys everywhere...
oh wait...let 'em run free then
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I'm sure a lot of environmentalists might be appalled, but, why are we trying to bring back or defend large predator species? Tigers eat people or eat things that people could eat, and they are faster and stronger than any naked man. Same can be said for lions, cheetahs, bears, gorillas, and more. We don't need -any- of these animals to be running around in any place except for on TV. It's just too dangerous! :-)
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The panda is an excellent example. They just weren't made to survive.
They need to eat constantly, because they get hardly any benefit from eating bamboo shoots, which they are unable to digest properly.
But they're too damn picky to eat anything but bamboo.
Anything that isn't willing to eat food capable of keeping it alive reliably deserves to die out, no matter how cute and cuddly it is.
All biologists/geneticists don't work on one project you know. There are people out there who do that "real science for humanity." But you may want to start asking why politicians and corporations don't try to fund research that investigates those topics, and not that laughable bill that was passed in the US not long ago which basically just subsidized more corn farmers.
Not trolling here, just wish this ethanol kick would end because it isn't feasible. Just look at the numbers.
Now back to the topic at hand. Helping revive an indigenous species which was wiped out by humans is beneficial to their problems with invasive species such as foxes. I'm not saying they will eat rabbits and rats, but it will add some more stabilization to the food web, and hopefully won't target the dingoes.
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You did. Didn't you notice the datestamp on this post? The year is 2035, and we're all working very hard on squashing the Unix epoch time bug.
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Reality check here, they aren't trying to create a means to save animals that go extinct. It wouldn't work anyway, because many creatures require habitat that dissapears, That being what makes them go extinct in the first place.
Few animals go extinct in a way that means they could be realistically revived. A shame, but true, so that would be a losing strategy.
Lets look at a recent example, the baiji dolphin. It is now functionally, if not totally, extinct, and a major part of the cause was the fact that their habitat is no longer what it used to be, i.e a vast, silty, *quiet* river. Now it's a vast, crowded, polluted river.
Hunting was a problem too, but wouldn't have been had not the environment changed so much (meaning if there were less humans utilizing the river). They've been hunted for thousands of years and only became endangered after the wide scale industrialization of the Yangtze River.
Same for the woolly mammoth. As interesting and challenging as the recreation of that species is (and possible too, there are still frozen mammoths being excavated with intact testicles). The big problem is that they are huge creates whose habitat is long gone. Where would they go if we made them again?
The Tasmanian Tiger is a special case, being rendered extinct fairly recently, and having it's habitat still almost entirely intact.
As for saving the animals in the first place, got a few trillion dollers to pay off the poverty line hugging people that are being paid pennies to actually go out and cut down habitats to make rich people richer? Cos I haven't.
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Why do you think we kept cats around for so long?
With all the oddball names the folks at Ubuntu use, my first thought was they had named their next release and had kept in code that was on the chopping block.
Imagine my surprise. . .
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The Thylacine ate my baby!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
I'm glad they're trying to bring back the 'Tassie'; it went extinct because of excessive hunting by humans. I believe that it's our responsibility to bring something back if we kill it off due to negligence. We had no hand in killing the dinosaurs however, so that's a different story. But we should try to right our wrongs in nature.
"Robyn Williams discussing the results with the lead scientists".
-Please, oh please, let that be a misspelling of the Robin Williams I know.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Agreed. There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.
Well, it would depend on WHY the species dwindled down to ~100. Was it because of natural selection or because man hunted them down to extinction. The latter was certainly the case with the American Bison and with the ongoing of whaling. And there is a case that, in a large part, man caused the Thylacine demise.
You might be able to use distant relatives to eventually create some sort of Thylacine cross. However the Thylacine is not related to either tigers or wolves though it went by the name Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf--it is closer in relation to the Tasmanian Devil. I can't think of why you want to rekindle another, LARGER carnivorous creature with a nasty temper.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
I get as sentimental about the poor as the next guy
;o).
Oopsies! That was supposed to read as "I get as sentimental about the poor [insert favoured endangered species here] as the next guy", except I used greater than and less than symbols in the original which was obviously filtered by the slashcode. For the record, I am, *in no way*, suggesting that we hunt the poor to extinction
The justification for preserving species is not because we feel guilty, but because biodiversity has tangible benefits for us. Large species, such as the panda, are excellent indicators for the health of an entire eco-system. As others have noted, animals such as the banji or the panda, or the orangutan go instinct not because of direct human action, but because they no longer have an ecosystem in which to live. That ecosystem may have plants in it that contain the genes that produce a protein that cures MS, or protects rice from a mutated fungus, etc.
It's not guilt, but self-interest that is the main justification for current conservation efforts.
Come on. People write books. Those books must be categorized in order to sell. There's no great conspiracy trying to ruin the science fiction genre and subjugate your reading habits. Take off the tinfoil hat.
My user number is prime. Is yours?
The individual species (esp. large cuddly ones like Pandas) may be the poster children of species preservation, but really it's more a matter of habitat preservation and ecosystem preservation in general rather than whether any one given species makes a difference. Would it really matter if the Bamboo forests in Japan all disappeared and the Pandas with them? ... maybe not in terms of Pandas and Bamboo, but who knows what the knock-on or unexpected effects of losing that would be, or of losing a large percentage of the amazonian jungle, etc. Do we care if global temperatures rise by a few degrees due to deforestatation or greenhouse gases? Maybe not on the level of temperatures, but what if that caused global fish stocks to crash, or fresh water supplies to disappear?
As far as the "poster children", I think there is still good reason to preserve them for their own sake. See how interested people are now in the Tasmanian Tiger which isn't even that different looking to other extant species... Don't you think it'd be a shame if the next generation of children grow up in a world where large species like Pandas, Rhinos, Elephants, Gorillas etc only exist as stuffed specimens in museums? In fact I'm sure we've already all but irrecoverably ensured the demise of that particular group. We're essentially at the stage where the Tasmanian Tiger was only known from a few examples in zoos and rumored sightings in the wild, until eventually all the zoo specimens had died too.
We're currently in the middle of what is probably the largest and quickest de-speciation "extinction event" the planet has ever known - something that makes the Permian extinction look like a non-event. From the timescale perspective of millions (or tens/hundreds of millions) of years this will only be an intersting point way back in history that our descendents (if our genetic lineagee survives that long) may ponder about, but on the human timescale of our own lifetime, and that of our children and grandchildren, it sure seems a shame to be taking such a giant shit in our own back yard.
The short answer to your question is yes. It wouldn't even have to be multiple sources because any biological tissue is made up of uncountable numbers of cells, each with their own copy of the genome. So really if you extract DNA from a big enough sample and can sequence enough small enough pieces of DNA, the problem becomes simple a computational one of lining them all up into chromosomes based on overlap. With current technology we're on the edge of being able to sequence something like a Nanderthal. For dinosaurs, there might be almost no DNA left, since the fossils aren't biological tissue, so I don't know if that will ever be possible. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314/5802/1113
Oh @#$%@!!! no!
The last thing I want is a house pet that sheds a wool blanket twice a year, has tusks that are nearly equal its body length and has the disposition of a Chihuahua.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Well, here's the thing. When white people settled in Tasmania, they actively hunted the Tasmanian Tiger (more accurately known as the Thylacine) to extinction because it was believed that it was responsible for killing sheep and other livestock.
The Thylacine's habitat is still largely intact, and there have been numerous "sightings" of them over the years, but no hard evidence. It is possible that a small colony of Thylacines have survived, given the elusive nature of the creature in the first place, but it's pretty unlikely.
This isn't some species from the ancient past that went extinct through the normal course of things. This is an animal that was doing just fine until humans showed up and hunted them into near-extinction over a period of about a thousand years.
By the 30s there weren't many left, and only in Tasmania, and we finished them off by placing bounties on them to keep them from attacking sheep. Not to mention the ever-growing destruction of habitat by our farming efforts, competition with the dogs we brought with us, and so forth.
Humans are almost entirely responsible for wiping out the Tasmanian tigers. If we could bring them back, I think we have an ethical obligation to do so, and I'd argue that for any species whose extinction can be directly attributed to human meddling.
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Not to mention the size of that pooper-scooper you'd have to take on a walk! Whooohooooo!!!
"Hey, careful out there in the back yard... you might step in a... oh... I'm sorry. The hose is over there."
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If the fiction is not based in science, then it should be classified as fantasy, not science fiction. We don't think there's a conspiracy -- we just think people are too stupid to categorize correctly.
Because they've been looking for the Tassie for the last 70 years. That hasn't quite panned out. Think about it. This isn't the entirety of the world's biological research focused at one thing. It's a bunch of scientists with some backing who are doing it. And it might have incredible payoffs (better ways to extract old/degraded DNA, figure out how to clone marsupials, blah blah). To do a search would require hundreds, if not thousands of workers, combing through the entire island on foot from end to end, looking in every cave, checking out every burrow. And that ain't going to be for free, or remotely cheap. The spinoff? They might find a Tassie colony.
When they get around to recreating recently extinct species I think a particularly good candidate is the Quagga. (And I'd love to have some breeding stock for it.)
One thing that the wikipedia article doesn't mention: Zebras are essentially a striped donkey, but they (and their hybrids) are generally vicious and impossible to break and train. The Quagga was an exception: It domesticated very nicely.
Others that would be fun to bring back:
- Dodo.
- Passenger Pigeon. (If only for the humor of having the eastern states paved in pigeon droppings twice a year as the sky-obscuring migration goes through.)
Both were apparently very tasty.
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So then if we bring them back, is that natural selection too?
"and having it's habitat still almost entirely intact"
But we are trying to chop it down as fast as we can.
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