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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 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.
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.
Does Mark Shuttleworth know about this?
-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!
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.
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
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
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.
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?
"You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct" * Iam Malcolm (p. 189)
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.
Assholes made the Ibex extinct... again.
".... 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...
No, we're not. Rats, cats and wild pigs (which admittedly got here via human transportation) are wiping out many of Australia's native animals. The conservationists cry out that we're killing the fuzzywuzzies but really, they're just being outcompeted by the first new species here for tens of thousands of years. Exactly the same thing happened when wild dogs first arrived here, now they're "native" and we call them dingos.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.