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."

Comments

7 minutes!

[Essequemodeia]

So.... I'm hoping the Ibex can breed within the first 3 minutes. Yes?

Re:7 minutes!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that is why they went extinct... the females wanted to much romance and mood music ;)

Re:7 minutes!

[fractoid]

Well, according to this link I googled up to support my case:

Because of the extreme rarity of the white tiger allele in the wild, the breeding pool is limited to the small number of white tigers in captivity, which additionally all descend from a common ancestor. Inbreeding between these tigers often leads to defects. Due to the high market value for white tigers, unscrupulous breeders will still inbreed white tigers to ensure the offspring also exhibit the recessive gene. Some animal rights activists have called for a halt to the breeding of white tigers altogether.

Breeding from a single very genetically similar pair results in a much higher than normal rate of genetic defects, but can still produce enough viable offspring to start the process going.

I think the general "you'd need 100 breeding couples to start a human colony" statement generally has an unspoken "unless you want 1 in 10 children to be born with serious congenital defects". It doesn't mean that the colony can't survive though.

Re:7 minutes!

[RockDoctor]

No. They would need a hundred, to have enough genetic variation to survive permanently.

Wellllll ... there's a substantial kernel of truth in there, but the reality is not as clearly cut as you (or your sources) make out. It's true that isolated breeding populations of very small size do tend to have problems with consanguinity and relatively high rates of expression of deleterious mutations, but on the flip side of that, the small population size means that the population can genetically drift much faster than a larger population can. So, if the small population "comes up with" new phenotypes (short hand for something more like "selects from randomly-presented combinations of established and mutated genes", but considerably longer) which are well adapted to their isolated environment, they can achieve local dominance rapidly.

How small those populations are ... is a very moot point, and almost certainly the numbers are different for different genera (since this process is a common route of speciation, it's pointless to talk at a species level).

An example - within living memory, the island of St.Kilda (60-some km west of the western Hebrides) was abandoned by it's human population, with consanguinity being cited as one of their major concerns. The population at the time of evacuation was 36 people (though the population profile would have been abnormal, having lost many of it's younger members in recent years). We can take this as an estimate of somewhat below the minimum population size necessary for an isolated human population. In contrast, before World War I the population seems to have been more-or-less stable in the high 70s or low 80s. Granted this is not an entirely isolated population, but it does give an indication. Perhaps better or more numerous data is available from the more numerous small Pacific Ocean islands, but again they're not entirely isolated.

In contrast, a recent report (I don't have the reference with me, but it was quite widely reported) of an isolated wolf pack in southern Sweden showed that it was suffering severely from inbreeding with around 8 members. But in contrast the appearance of a single unrelated individual male wolf in the late 1990s (IIRC) practically reversed the long-term decline of the pack. This suggests that the viable minimum population size for canines may be as low as the dozens.

Excluding social factors, the number of pairings available in a population 'n' scales as (n^2-n)/4 ; if pairings are not lifelong ... well, you get the picture.

For the SF fan - it's never puzzled me why the "colony world" type of story sticks (more or less) to monogamous couples and nuclear families (it's a fictional device), I suspect that in a real-world scenario that couldn't be allowed. What sort of a solution would have to be brought up, I don't know. Maybe the women starting pregnancies alternately by natural means and by IVF "from the egg and sperm banks, at random". But I suspect that "something would have to be done" to get the population gene pool bigger, faster.

For the anthropologist ... there's a scenario about Australia (or any random non-African continent) being colonised by a single woman, pregnant with a male foetus, being blown on a raft/ boat/ flood debris raft across from Indonesia. Not impossible, but decidedly implausible. Individuals getting blown off course in small coast-hugger boats, landing on the Australia shore at intervals of less than (say) a decade, and eventually two of opposite sexes surviving for long enough to meet ... that seems much more credible. And a decade later, another human arrives, and a decade later, another arrives. Pretty soon, you've got a substantial colony (I make it less than a century to reach a population of about 30 adults even with some fairly pessimistic assumptions about mortality rates).

HUMANS: -

[Bananatree3]

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.

Re:HUMANS: -

[Anonymous Coward]

The only species with the idiocy and shortsightedness to make a species go extinct

Ridiculous. Humans may be better at causing extinctions than other species but that isn't because other species are reluctant to do it, or consider the implications at all.

Re:HUMANS: -

[alx5000]

Yes, and since we have the ability to both consider the implications of and avoid the extinction of other species, we should at least try to be a little worse at it...

Re:HUMANS: -

[flyingsquid]

Except the species isn't extinct. The species Capra pyrenaica is still alive, it's just that one subspecies, Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica is extinct.

Re:HUMANS: -

[Jack9]

"destabilize" is pejorative without qualification. "change" or "influence" is accurate. Perhaps that was not the point you were trying to make. Causing and preventing extinctions are inevitable, amoral events (we damn near exterminate diseases, both animal and human, without much complaint). It's interesting to see how many tree-huggers are on /. Implying that the genetic code of certain fluffy/swimmy organisms, by extension their species, are sancrosanct is disturbingly ignorant. Your Morals May Vary.

Ibex 8.10 Cloned

[auric_dude]

Does Mark Shuttleworth know about this?

How fast are they?

[damburger]

-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...

NOT CLONES! NOT CLONES

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Know I'm just a simple

[Splab]

city living boy, but when did goats start laying eggs?

Other cloned critters

[spaceyhackerlady]

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

Re:Pyrenean Ibex, bucardo.

[Thiez]

> Better, stronger, faster.

Looking at its lifetime, we did a very very good job at the 'faster' part.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

[Colin Smith]

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.
 

Re:Nature, red in tooth and claw.

[Anpheus]

After enough adaptations and mutations, you cease to classify an animal as being in the same species as its ancestor. If these adaptations occur based on local conditions, then it isn't uncommon for the two species to coexist. No matter that they haven't evolved yet enough to invent taxes, death is still certain. And if the local adaptations make one species better globally, then you'll see competition and likely, the extinction of the ancestor's species.

You have to remember that the definition of species is vague, that the tree of life has many branches, and that inevitably, all branches terminate. So evolution constantly produces more and more species, and even when there is no branch, a large enough change will be considered the line between one species and another.

Evolution doesn't necessitate extinction, it's the semantics we use to describe it and the cold hard fact that you can't indefinitely sustain every species that has ever existed on Earth.

Re:Nature, red in tooth and claw.

[mdarksbane]

And this is the fun problem with the layman's explanation of evolution. Unless you were trying to be funny.

The fossil record is littered with hundreds and thousands of creatures that have no direct genetic descendants. They failed, they went extinct, they lost.

However, quite a few other ones survived to evolve into the mass of life we have today.

Natural selection is based on extinction. The failed mutations die. Sometimes the whole failed species dies. But somewhere up the evolutionary tree, their second or third cousins twice removed were better adapted and survived.

It is pure arrogance to think we are the only creatures who drive this process. How many herbivores were eaten by tigers? How many carnivores went extinct their prey moved on or died? How many fish died simply because their part of the world dried up? How many diseases have wiped out hundreds of acres of trees - entire species have gone locally extinct in the last hundred years. Yes, we have a huge affect, but we aren't the only thing.

Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't try to mitigate our effects - if we destroy the environment, we'll be dealing with an entirely new mess that *we* didn't evolve for. But have some perspective.

Re:Nature, red in tooth and claw.

[10Neon]

Some of them are quite good at it. Raccoons, pigeons, rats, cockroaches, to name a few. Sure, they're not species we particularly like but it is certainly not the case that an urbanized environment is a human-only zone.

Re:Nature, red in tooth and claw.

[mrsquid0]

>Wrong. Evolution is false.

Evolution is a mathematical concept that can be applied to physical and biological (and other) systems. Saying that evolution is false is a lot like saying that optimization is false, or that group theory is false.

Re:Nature, red in tooth and claw.

[morgan_greywolf]

Saying that evolution is false is a lot like saying that optimization is false

But optimization is, by default, false unless you specify the -O option.

Inbred sheep

[VernorVinge]

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/

Re:What?

[RockMFR]

Quiet liberal. Cloning is the manly, patriotic way of doing things. I bet you're one of the types who thinks we should worry about global warming before the ice caps melt, huh?

What's the point?

[macraig]

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?

I love your idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's start by killing you off first.

Re:Extinct?

[Smallpond]

Or to become extinct twice.

D:

[onionlee]

Assholes made the Ibex extinct... again.

Re:What?

[im_thatoneguy]

Problem is wild animals can't really be reasoned with.

Just because Cows are exhibitionist sex aholics doesn't mean ever species will breed in captivity.

An ibex doesn't care if it's about to go extinct, it's going to be just as easy to breed in captivity if there are a million left or two.

Even some humans swear "if we were the last two people on earth they still wouldn't sleep with you"--Errr "them"! I meant to say "They wouldn't sleep with them"!