Slashdot Mirror
Extinct Pyrenean Ibex Cloned
jamie points out a story in the Telegraph about a project to clone the Pyrenean Ibex (known also as bucardo), a species that went extinct in 2000. Before the last known member of the species died, scientists took tissue samples to begin a project to clone the animal. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. " Now, for the first time, one of them has survived the gestation period, living for seven minutes after birth. One of the researchers said, "The delivered kid was genetically identical to the bucardo. In species such as bucardo, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance."
So.... I'm hoping the Ibex can breed within the first 3 minutes. Yes?
a whole seven minutes? well no wonder they're extinct
A species recently dead. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to clone the world's first extinct species. Pyrenean Ibex will be that species. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.
"You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct"
* Iam Malcolm (p. 189)
The only species with the idiocy and shortsightedness to make a species go extinct, and the only species with the passionate pursuit knowledge to bring them back.
This means we can massacre all sorts of exotic species for better burgers without fear of wiping them out!
Yay science!
Have they seen Jurassic Park? No!? Oh my god...
Does Mark Shuttleworth know about this?
Now, for the first time, one of them has survived the ingestation period, living for seven minutes after birth.
So after the birth they gave it to CowboyNeal?? How long do you fuckin expect a newborn to live while bathing in stomach acid??
Geez. Dummies.
-We clocked the Pyrenean Ibex at 30mph
-(looking horrified)You cloned a Pyrenean Ibex!?
Somehow, I don't think the Jurassic Park tag is completely accurate...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Extiction is a natural part of life. Over time MOST species have gone extinct with very few ancestral lineages leading to the present extant species. There have been many mass extinctions in the past and there is still significant (though different from previously present) diversity. Are we perhaps a little misguided in our attempts to make this world's diversity static?
Arrg. Mr. Pedantic here this AM. But this really isn't cloning. You still have the host egg's mitochondrial DNA (and various bits of other important things). And of course the obligate "now we can clone dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. A pox on Steven Spielberg.
If his noodliness had intended mankind to clone things, he would have just left us at the amoeba stage.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
... and they'll be right up there with the mayflies. Imagine the possibilities.
The obvious problem here is that even if you could easily and reliably produce clones (and introduce enough genetic variation to ensure long-term viability), the same factors that doomed the species originally will probably make it impossible to reintroduce the clones into the wild. So while this advance may be suitable for producing zoo specimens, it's a far cry from restoring an extinct species to its natural state.
city living boy, but when did goats start laying eggs?
Wait a second. So these things went extinct just 10 years ago. Wouldn't it have been a lot easier (and cheaper) to, um, keep some of them alive instead of waiting until they died off? So if they do clone them and they live, how are they supposed to survive now when they couldn't survive just a decade ago?
Better known as 318230.
I'm not up to date on the latest cloning methods. So if anything in my speculation is incorrect feel free to point it out. That being said though. If the cloning methods are so inefficient wouldn't the be better off perfecting their cloning methods on species that aren't extinct. So that they don't waste the samples they took of the species, before it was extinct on these failed attempts. Granted this one lived for seven minutes before it died due to defects and one might be able to take DNA samples from it. The only problem I can see with this is degradation of the DNA. Copies of a copy of a copy until you end up with an unsalvageable DNA. This entire problem seems reminiscent of the Asgard's problem in the series Stargate SG-1. Granted this is fiction I'm talking about and not reality but it seems that the same thing could happen.
I take the jurassic approach to parenting. Try this: Jurassic Approach
There was an article along these lines in New Scientist a couple of week ago, looking at the availability of DNA and the availability of modern host species. Some are fairly good, like tasmanian tigers, which have lots of tissue samples available and a good candidate for a host, the anything-but-extinct tasmanian devil. Marsupials also have very short gestation, with the embryo completing its development in the mother's pouch.
Other are farther out, like the dodo (no good DNA samples), the woolly rhinoceros (lots of DNA, the modern host is itself seriously endangered), and so on. One extinct species of armadillo would be the size of a VW Beetle. Even if you had DNA, no modern armadillo or related creature is anywhere nearly big enough.
...laura
I, for one, welcome our new velociraptor overlords.
Historically, that is how we've judged the success of cloning, or genetically manipulated animals. A lot has to happen after fertilization -- blastulation, gastrulation, then further development, any one of those can be considered a success. Early cloning experiments with the common frog (Rana pippens) were considered successful because the made it to the gasturla stage, another frog species formed viable embryos, but not frogs, and was still a success. Dolly surviving well into adulthood was a fluke, and she still died early, of something that might have had a genetic cause. It really is all how you care to define success. If you thought we were a few years away from re-creating Jurassic Park, or someone promised you a harem of 50 Jessica Alba clones in a few years time, yeah, this is a very disappointing story for you.
The only species with the idiocy and shortsightedness to make a species go extinct,
Completely utterly wrong.
All species end up extinct. They are replaced by others which are more fit for the environment.
Deleted
Seriously.
They have one individual. Even if they made a thousand clones of that individual, you still wouldn't save the species. Even if you were able to manipulate the embryos into male and females, you're still stuck with absolutely no genetic diversty.
Nice try, but start by cloning a healthy population first.
I thought both words were supposed to start with the same letter. How about Pyrenean Platypus - doesn't that sound better?
There is no way cloning a single animal can be a viable method to reintroduce a species. The inbreeding necessary to maintain the line will eventually destroy its genetic health. Wild populations generally require 50 different animals in order to maintain the species' genetic viability. I would submit that in controlled laboratory environment, 32 specimens or 16 pairs would be the minimul viable population. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Minimum_viable_population_size/
Stay skeptical, my friends.
Why didn't they start cloning before the Ibex went extinct?
Think of the human precursors that could be cloned using cell scrapings from George W. Bush's mouth!
Then imagine a Beowolf clu*GONG* Awww.
What's the point of reviving this species of Ibex, unless we also remove the conditions that caused it to go extinct in the first place? I'm guessing that condition is known by the name Homo sapiens?
It's guilt and sentimentalism driving this behavior, not pragmatism. Does anyone recall the movie "Silent Running"? We're continuing to motor headlong toward that consequence and not making the pragmatic changes necessary to avert it.
To hell with fighting global warming or terrorism: we need to be reversing human overpopulation, NOW, before Mother Nature finally finds a way to do it for us. Cloning a few members of this Ibex species is a waste of effort when the PROBLEM still exists and is GROWING. Are we going to put these Ibex in a space ark and fly them out to Jupiter?
Just some mindless rambling...
The cloned animal, which was genetically identical to the original, had deformed lungs. This particular problem apparently presents in other cloning processes. Can we conclude that either the process is flawed or the DNA collected is damaged?
Not to say that we cannot get there eventually using recently acquired DNA. I notice other issues of concern. In particular that DNA degrades over time, even when frozen. That would mean that simply collecting and storing DNA is not enough. We would have to find some way to make a "backup" of the DNA, and then synthesize, perfectly, a new set or repair breaks in the old set in order to have a perfectly viable clone source.
And then the "nearly complete" genome of the woolly mammoth. What then happens when we attempt to resurrect the poor dead beast? We clone an incomplete animal, or perhaps merge it with a pachyderm because we believe it was related, even though the evidence which might form, or break, that relation is missing. While trying to interpolate the animals true design, we either create an entirely different animal or end up with something the resembles a transporter accident.
Point being, we do not know enough about how these intricate building blocks work. I see DNA as a kind-of programming language, and most of us know what happens when you try to inject code which was not part of the original: something breaks or crashes.
I also think about how many domestic animal breeds have been brutalized by selective breeding, to the point that some prized show animals have demeanor issues or can barely breathe because of facial distortions.
Mind you, that seems to focus on the failures. There are plenty of examples of successes. And considering the myriad examples of successful selective breeding, cloning just might one day step to the level of reviving animals recently and properly preserved, but species of which we hold an incomplete genome? While study of the genome will be interesting and possibly reveal some unimaginable secrets, I believe the cloning of such species will be a dead-end.
For starters, I'm suprised with all the talk about cloning Mammoths and such no one thought to start with something simpler like the Yangtze river dolphin that went extinct just last year. Certainly there's no problem getting DNA samples for that. It's nice then to see there are scientific groups starting with something a little more realistic before considering moving on to the longer extinct species.
But here's my concern, it's not that getting DNA is the issue as such, the problem is getting enough DNA that's genetically diverse enough to maintain a healthy population. If we manage to get the DNA of a mammoth and bring it back then great, that's fine but what then? I'm not convinced we can get DNA from a diverse enough selection of a species to maintain a healthy population. Mammoths aside, do we likely have diverse enough set of DNA from the Yangtze river dolphin, our most recent loss, let alone from this Ibex which died out 8 or 9 years ago?
If we're serious about cloning as a technique to bring back extinct species, then the reality is we need to be archiving DNA from thousands of members of each endangered species now. A lack of diversity in a species brought back by cloning is simply going to lead to their extinction again.
This is a problem that's already affecting some of the flora that is close to extinction. We have in recent years lost (or very likely lost) species of flora from the wild but yet have them en-masse in cultivation. Perhaps a good example is Echnocactus grusonii, otherwise known as the golden barrel cactus which almost everyone will have seen as they can be purchased in nearly every garden centre worldwide. It's somewhat of a success story that the plant (which is pretty impressive) will be available for future generations to see, but it's also rather a problem in that most of them out there all stem from a single plant. As one plant can provide millions of seeds most nurseries will just take those seeds and plant them en-masse (usually in Spanish fields in Europe, but using similar methods in the southern US and China). Each seed will have some genetic diversity if cross-pollination occured between two separate plans but this by itself isn't enough.
To provide an example, anyone who has been to Arizona or lives there will know that it's a pretty diverse state in terms of climate and one of it's most picturesque plants the Saguaro cactus (Carnegia gigantea) grows across large parts of the state, ranging from some of the lower lying areas, through to some of the high er lying areas, now the problem is that those living in the hottest parts of the state, such as down by Tucson wont see temperatures anywhere near as low as those at higher, colder areas. Furthermore, some populations will be prone to suffering snow sometimes, and getting a lot more went and damp than others due to increased humidity in some areas and this is the crux of the problem. We could not take seeds from a population that has grown in the desert regions for thousands of years and plant them in the colder, wetter regions and expect them to survive as a population, therefore if a species like this were to go extinct and we only had viable seed from a specific region it is possible that they would be limited to that region, it would take thousands and thousands years for natural selection to select those hardy enough to move from that region back to the areas they previously inhabited, but during that time the reintroduced population is at risk due to the much smaller areas they'd occupy. Currently, many species are critically endangered for exactly this reason, they may grow in areas no bigger than a small village, and those areas are all too often at risk- a current example is Arrojadoa marylanae which exists only a small quartz hill range in Brazil that is currently targetted for mining of the quartz, destruction of this small area will lead to extinction of at least one, maybe multiple species of flora from our planet, and it currently doesn't seem to be that we have enough samples of this held sa
I suppose, for 7 minutes, it technically wasn't extinct!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Let's start by killing you off first.
why on earth is this tagged ubuntu, it has nothing in common with it other than the coincidence of the name
Why don't they cook up something new and cool, like maybe a six legged animal with a corporate logo right in the fur pattern.
And make it low fat, but tasty.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
*Humans* are the only species that actively exterminate other species on a massive scale
Mother nature is not a "species". I was talking specifically about "species" in my original post.
I simply stated that humans are in a unique position - we can and do actively exterminate species, and we also actively bring species back. NO other living thing on the planet has that kind of ability.
More like divine reckoning. We all know those pesky little goats had it coming.
What exactly is the plan? Re-introduce them to their former habitat? A genetic copy of an animal does not give it the nurturing and education its parents can provide, it does not mean that the animal will be anywhere near the behaviour they exhibit in the wild. Consequently, once released, it will be unable to live up to its potential.
At best, if this 'cloned' Ibex survives, it will be more or less domesticated and dependent on humans for its survival.
of the NNPT "Nuclear Non-Prolifieration Treaty"? Talk about dormant (sleeper) cells getting nuclear powers, hehhehe...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Assholes made the Ibex extinct... again.
The ancestors of the ibexes had to learn the behaviors that let them survive in the wild in the first place.
That's a small problem, compared with the problem of genetic defects. This is now a species represented by a single gene set. Even if they manage to do a little genetic engineering to produce male and female ibexes, that's nowhere near enough to produce a viable species.
Don't piss me off or I will kill you, rez you, and kill you again! O.o
Reality is prettier inside my head...
I guess Ibex aren't that intrepid after all
They probably died off because we destroyed their environment. So unless we can clone that, this is just a pointless "gee whiz" exercise.
".... a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen."
They should be cross-breeding them till they come up with one that lives in liquid helium instead...
Won't somebody please think of the kids!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Alright... it's been extinct for 9 years. I'm still alive. Everyone else is still alive. With the exception of a bloated, run-amok government threatening to make us ALL extinct, everything is hunky dorey. Why clone it? How about cloning some human organs instead, so we can save more lives and help keep our bloated population huge? Wait....
If we let them go extinct once not so long ago, what's the point of resurrecting them? Has our attitude towards animals (or other creations of the great Noodly One) changed so much over the last 9 years that we wouldn't let them go extinct again? On the other hand, I suppose if there's a remote possibility that they'll learn something from these efforts that will one day make it possible to resurrect a raptor, then go for it!
weinersmith
There's nothing wrong with another species going extinct, except for your own misplaced sentimentality. Extinction is a natural part of the course of events in an ecosystem. The inferior species are destroyed so that new ones may emerge. The new ones then fan out, specialize, speciate, and diversity is renewed, until they too are made extinct.
This is my sig.
exactly my point. It also appears dingo ancestors arrived by boat 3-4 thousand years ago with seafaring humans.
Whether deliberate, through gross negligence or simply out of ignorance, humans have brought the extinction of various species whether directly or indirectly. Whether out of malice or simply out of cause an effect for an unrelated pursuit.
I'm not trying to simply denounce humans as "virii", but to show an interesting dichotomy - Humans have both the capability (or soon to be) to revive a species that was once extinct, and the ability to make many species extinct.
This is where human morality meets nature that just "is".
Some use this to justify to destroy what they want
Others justify it to save what ever they want
- When it's taught in the classroom, it's survival of the fittest, because, as we all know, it's impossible for a school board to even hint at the existence of a god which might create living things... or dictate some kind of morality to his creation.
- But when it's a cute and fuzzy creature whose poor adaption to the environment results in its demise and extinction, somehow it becomes an ecological catastrophe about which all proper schoolchildren must be concerned. And oh, let's not forget, it's all our fault that said species doesn't taste good or have some other interesting property which can be commercialized.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Wow. It lasted a whole 7 minutes. Now if only it last a few years till breeding season.
I suppose microsoft was in charge of the DNA code and that's why it crashed so quickly?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
This is a repeat animal. Come on, /.
Genetically-identical => no lung defects that made it live only for 7 minutes.
It's not an Ibex fault-
You must be Gnu here.
.
.
- aqk
F U
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... but I can't be the only one who would love to try out a big juicy mammoth steak the size of my car!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Of course someone posts about VHEMT the day I don't have mod points.
we should do this with larger creatures then make an amusement park where people can visit these said creatures. Don't worry we can hold the mean ones back with a gigantic electric fence that zaps the critter when he gets too close.
so whose with me???
Before putting all this effort, time, and money into bringing back an extinct species, shouldn't scientists first be required to answer the question, "How does it taste?"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
White and Black were Selected, not Evolved. The gene pool already contained those attributes, nothing to see here, move along.
If it went extinct in 2000 it has disappeared. No way of avoiding that. Now perhaps it could be resurrected, but should it?
Focus on the species that are still around