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Bringing Giant Tortoises Back From Extinction
fizzysister writes "The BBC reports that scientists at Yale are intending to resurrect an extinct species of Galapagos tortoise, the Geochelone elephantopus. Unfortunately, not in the style of Jurassic Park, so no tortoise-based theme parks just yet. They will, however, be using genetic profiling of living tortoises that carry some of the elephantopus genes, to select the most appropriate of these to mate and thus eventually (after a century or more) create a generation of 'pure' Geochelone elephantopus individuals."
But will they run Linux?
Perhaps a Beowulf cluster?
any plans on training these resurrected giant tortoises in the art of Ninjitsu. What a gip.
Monstar L
If this interbreeding of existing species is successful, it begs the question:
Are the existing species really separate species, or are the merely subspecies or even just breeds of the same species?
The answer depends on the definition of species.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I thought they were not supposed to appear for another few thousand years. They are obviously moving into the first experimental stages of their master plan ;)
Not run so much as shuffle.
are these same scientists trying to bring back the brick phone or black & white TV?
What is the point of this?
They're using their grammar skills there.
I want my own giant tortoise for a pet!
Blar.
Too late, we already have the modern-day brick phone.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
100 years and how much money to bring back an extinct turtle? I just hope I'm around in 100 years for the great turtle project centennial unveiling. Of coure, they ARE turtles, did you think this would happen quickly?
Can someone explain the value of these giant tortioses in objective, real terms?
There are a few things that would be useful about bringing back an extinct tortoise.
For one, it allows the animal to reclaim its place in the ecosystem. I don't have information on what caused the extinction of this tortoise, but I know of certain mammals that are fond of killing slow-moving things. If the tortoise went extinct not by natural selection, then it may have left a void in its natural ecosystem that could have downstream effects on stability of the same.
Though perhaps more tangible is that some of these tortoises could live 150+ years. If we want to study aging and what mechanisms could prolong a healthy life, then something that lives extraordinarily long would be quite valuable. Of course we could study old trees, but we have more in common with other vertebrates.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I imagine people will scream about "Playing God"(tm) in these circumstances. They, of course, say, "What a miracle" when they are brought back from what should have been a death by heart attack. Personally, I think small northern russian and canadian provinces could really have a boom if we'd bring back mastodons and such, selling the hunting rights. In my view, you're only "Playing God" if you're talking velociraptors and making your own artificial creepy stuff. I just can't see "Giant Tortoises go on rampage", unless they have jet packs and live in Tokyo.
meh
Nope, they don't run Linux, but they do have a shell which in this case is a tortoise/atmosphere interface. OK so it's hardware rather than software but it's suprising how much a tortoise and a computer have in common. If you've got a tired old Celeron like me, you'll even find they 'run' about as fast!
Smivs on the intertubes!
gct says one species, Geochelone elephantopus, with 14 different races or sub-species, three of which are believed to be extinct.
... it's alive and well.
So just to clarify, several races are extinct and this discusses bringing them back to life. The species itself though is not extinct
Gee sounds like what a couple of German scientists did with the Aurochs in the 1920's. Sure tortoises breed slower than cows, but this is hardly new. Read "The Ghost with Trembling Wings" for a pretty thorough treatment of extinction, species definition, and conservation history. It discusses a number of similar programs.
But the long intervals between generations mean that even if the project does start,
..it's usually fruit flies with them biologists.
Sounds like a tight schedule, they better get a move on.
it will not be concluding any time soon. A century ahead would be a fair bet.
The portions of soup would be a lot smaller.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do they run Linux?
Well, they do have a shell.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
Previous experiments resulted in only three asses, they were totally worthless...
Ever see William Hurt in the Dune miniseries? His acting was so wooden, he put trees to sleep.
I haven't. Was it anything like Jonathan Taylor Thomas in that movie or Seth Adkins in that TV movie or (shudder) Roberto Benigni in still another movie?
LOOK OUT ONE GOT LOOSE!!! AHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (10 minutes later)... AHHhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHh!!! (3 hours later)... AAaaaaahhhHHHHHHH!! Wow, we should really start walking away from this thing crawling towards us Huh?
It's really tortoises all the way down.
Gamara is really neat, he is full of turtle meat, we all love you ga-ma-raaaaaaa!!!
Evolve.. not.. they devolve by natural methods, then we Frankenstein them back to life to say how cute they are.
But I can contradict myself, [wiki] "Populations fell dramatically because of hunting and the introduction of predators and grazers by humans since the seventeenth century".. humans are part of the evolution processes, so our interactions in whatever negative or positive form are part and parcel of the process.
But as always GC said it best "We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet?"
The definition of species from your primary or secondary education about critters that can breed is a gross simplification. (I pity if you heard it in college also.) That is one basis for determining a species. Others are:
Location, meaning these individuals could procreate with those, but they never travel far enough to do so (like across an ocean). Sometimes called "populations."
Morphology, i.e. color, patterns, size.
Habits, i.e. where they rest or what they eat.
Mating preferences can be based on all of the above. An example: finches that rest in trees and eat small seeds from succulent bushes tend to prefer the same, even though they can mate with finches that rest in rocks and eat larger seeds from weeds. These groups may live intermingled, they just don't choose mates that way. New chicks learn patterns from their parents, act that way as they age, and hang out with (mate) those who are similar. This is akin to humans marrying only folks of the same social class. Studies on the finches in the Galapagos show that nearly any "species" CAN mate with the others, they just don't.
The other large reason to define species is funding. More folks will donate to help the "Floreana tortoise" if it is called its own species, even though it is identical to the "Isabela tortoise" except for 1) the island they were/are on, and 2) a few genes. The rallying cry, "Restore the Floreana tortoise" is catchier than, "Move some tortoises and manage their breeding based on DNA."
The article mentions how tortoises may have been moved from Floreana to Isabela, but they don't mention the real causes of the extinction in the first place. The same whaling ships left goats on the islands to breed and create a population they can harvest meat from next time they visit. The goat population exploded. These goats eat the same bushes the tortoises eat, depriving them of food. The ships also left rats which ate their eggs. Over the past 10 years, eradication campaigns have wiped out the goats from almost all of the islands, and have eliminated rats from some of them. Now that the main causes of the extinctions have been (are are being) removed, efforts to reclaim the populations are starting. This is just one.
For more information, see http://www.galapagos.org/2008/ or look up "Lonesome George."
The rat is optional. There's now a book to train them. Just have your children and grandchildren teach them to read.
+1 parent for informative
Bear with me as I go a bit abstract, but /. is for nerds, right? Organisms are a kind of fixed point. a zygote with genome G implanted in an organism with womb (or egg, or, more generally, an environment of some sort) W gives rise to some organism O. O = f(G,W) where f is the 'development' function. But W is itself a function of the organism. So we really have O = f(G,W(O)). O is a fixed point of the function \x -> f(G,W(x)). But it's not at all clear this equation has unique solutions.
Just so you know I haven't gone off the rails consider the example of Ken Thompsons's famous paper. You might imagine that compiling the source of a C compiler with the compiler it produces is guaranteed to give you the 'right thing'. It's exactly analogous, the 'development' process has multiple fixed points.
So it's not 100% clear to me that selectively breeding an organism with the same genome gives rise to the same organism. It depends on how much the state stored in the environment W contributes to O.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
What about the Darwin Goat which resides on the sides of the dome volcanoes on the Galapagos island of Espanola. Or the Galapagos Goat which resides on the eastern rim of the Galapagos island of Darwin? Neither are bulls, but both sh1t.
how exactly do you get an extinct animal back by interbreeding its modern day ancestors, clearly you aren't going to get the exact same traits?
I will care about non-native species arguments as soon as you exterminate all the pigeons and Rattus Norwegicus in North America and rabbits in Australia.
Thanks,
-- Terry
A successful example is this one, to "re-create" a quagga -- part zebra/part horse that went extinct in 1883. http://www.quaggaproject.org/
Looks like tortoises really DO do it slow!
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