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The Passenger Pigeon: A Century of Extinction
An anonymous reader writes On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon was found dead in her aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo. When the first European settlers arrived in North America at least one of every four birds on the continent was a passenger pigeon, making them the most numerous birds in North America, and perhaps in the world. From the article: "But extinction apparently doesn't ring with the finality it used to. Researchers are working to 'de-extinct' the bird. They got their hands on some of the 1,500 or so known passenger pigeon specimens and are hoping to resurrect the species through some Jurassic Park-like genetic engineering. Instead of using frog DNA to fill out the missing parts of a dinosaur's genetic code as in Michael Crichton's story, the real-life 'bring-back-the-passenger pigeon' researchers are using the bird's closest relative, the band-tailed pigeon.
This one is over a year old... and just reposted.
Not just Reposted, reconstructed from the DNA of the old one
What, September 1, 2014 was a year ago!??! I've lost a year!
I can't wait to make it extinct again!
...before finally reconstructing a dodo, which is, after all, also a pigeon.
I'd guess bird DNA would be better – for both cases....
It's worse than that, it's exactly 100 years old today.
I'm not understanding "missing DNA"... if they think there is "missing DNA",and they have 1,500 specimens, all less than 2-300 years old, they need to talk to J. Craig Venter, because they're doing it wrong.
This is a lot like what happened to both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
Both were wildly successful at one time, at well over 90% of the browser market share. But then each was decimated. Netscape Navigator was totally destroyed, and rendered extinct. Netscape Navigator became the Passenger Pigeon. IE, Navigator's successor, is now on the same path. Once representing 90% of the market, it is now down to 20% at most. It, too, could very well be practically extinct within a few years.
But it is Chrome that needs to fear the most. It is the most used browser today, but it sees nowhere near the usage that Navigator and IE saw at their peaks. Chrome, too, could go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. All it would take is Mozilla undoing the stupidity that they have brought upon Firefox lately. If they canned the shitty designers who have ruined Firefox's UI, and brought back people who know what they're doing, Firefox could potentially crush Chrome. All that Firefox needs is a return to a good UI, and some fixes for the long-standing performance and memory usage issues, and it'd be a real contender again. Firefox could make Chrome become the Passenger Pigeon.
If the Passenger Pigeon has been extinct for this long, it's safe to say that ecosystems have adjusted to their demise. Let's not see what the consequences of re-introducing them are. There is no way to predict the effect. If they are planning and engineering these hybrids just to study their work in captivity, well, that is just as wrong.
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You got it all wrong. They are lizards! There is proof: http://www.thewire.com/nationa... 12 million Americans cannot all be wrong.
You are obviously a shill for big airlines and don't want the re-introduction of free flights via passenger pigeon because it will eat into your lucrative flight slot monopoly revenue.
You may recall Netscape's user-agent string was Mozilla. Within the company called Netscape, the browser was called Mozilla. The full name of Firefox is Mozilla Firefox.
Netscape was rebranded Mozilla Seamonkey. As Mozilla Seamonkey gained more and more features, some of the Mozilla (aka Netscape browser) people decided to make a version with some of the features removed to make it more streamlined, a lightweight version of the Mozilla browser, previously known as Netscape. They called this lightweight version of Netscape Firefox. *
*First they tried calling it Phoenix, which is an animal which is resurrected from it's own ashes. Somebody already had that name. A Phoenix is also known as a Firebird, but somebody already had that name, so they ended up with Firefox.
Somebody still wants to make his pigeons, eh? Well he was the one who proved he could do it, let's see if these new fellas are up to the task.
we can just burn them out of the skies!
hungry, anyone?
I read as a child stories from 'James Fenimore Cooper', not sure if it was mentioned in one of the 'The Leatherstocking Tales' or another one. ... baby seals got killed up into the late 1990s, unbelievable, elephants are still killed in the 10,000ds per year, and we likely only have 50k left.
Anyway, a town prepared for the birds, they armed cannons with pellet ammunition. Cannons, not mere rifles! While the fighting in those stories already was tough, for a child, the massacre on the birds I never understood, until I read about other animal massacres
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If this happens, farmers will be delighted when a ten-million bird flock descends on the fields.
"A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something." such as our desire to read /.
I think it would make more sense to simply create a more bird-friendly environment (ie more sustainable development, no hunting, allow for return of wild forested spaces) and if there is a role for a passenger pigeon-like bird it will eventually be occupied by an existing bird species and those with passenger pigeon-like traits will be the most successful.
The passenger pigeon was killed by
1) overhunting - presumably, we can stop that, but we are doing the same thing to fish right now - what reason do we have to believe we would not immediate overhunt pigeons back to extinction?
2) habitat loss - we haven't done anything to address this. If anything in the past 100 years we've made the problem worse. Development is both good and bad, but for preserving natural habitats, we have not really solved all problems (or arguably even prioritized) allowing development in a way which is sustainable in terms of natural resources and does not threaten wildlife habitats.
Could passenger pigeons start over "from ground zero"? If they could be in a lab, I am very skeptical that such populations would survive.
I imagine if Kang and Kodoss ate all the humans and reduced all human works to rubble and poisone, then genetically engineered a bunch of humans and left them on the planet and said "go repopulate". It just would not work.
Birds are intelligent animals, require long developmental periods (with care of their already-able parents) and form complex social networks that allow them to thrive in adverse conditions. http://rstb.royalsocietypublis... Passenger pigeons would migrate 1000s of miles depending on weather patterns, and used decision-making processes we have yet to understand.
"On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon was found dead in her aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo."
And nobody back then suspected fowl play?
One thing almost always missing whenever the Passenger Pidgeon is talked about is how our pioneer ancestors considered them a major pest and threat.
Old wood cuts and descriptions from a couple of centuries ago describe how a large flock of these birds would decend on a farm and inside a few hours completely eat all the food (grain), leaving a family to face certian starvation. Remember , back then, there are no food stamps, no food banks, no state welfare, etc. Starvation was very real and people did die of it.
I am NOT excusing or apologizing or in any way, shape or form trying to justify what happened, but I am trying to point out that events in history, both good and bad, usually happens for a reason. Rightly or wrongly, our pioneer ancestors often looked upon the passenger pidgeon in almost the same way we look at the cockroach today. That is the major reason they were wiped out. The problem, as I see it, is history today portrays the extinction of the passenger pidgeon as the result of a bunch of people just killing for fun or no reason at all. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Along the same lines, wolves were wiped out because they were seen as a threat to livestock in many areas. Groundhogs and gophers killed because thier holes were dangerous for horses who stepped into them and broke legs. Buffalo where killed because they were a major food source for native americans during the Indian Wars. The list goes on and on. Again, not saying it was a good or just reason, it might of been a terrrible reason, a horrible reason, but there was still a reason these things happened.
The passenger pigeon is a blight on humanity. Bring back a bird worth having, like the Carolina parakeet.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Tell me you didn't use the MyCleanPC DNA.
Do we really want to bring back the prolific flying-rat in recorded history?
I saw we make the urban pigeon join them instead.....
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Are you sure, Bones?
God dammit, Jim, I'm a fucking doctor! I know death! I can see it! I can smell it! I can taste it!
No - March 15, 2013 :)
Has any species actually been successfully brought back from extinction yet?
How big were these things?
And "No expense was spared."
Here's hoping they can get enough nuclear DNA that whatever "Franken-bird" they create will be 100% carrier pigeon, at least DNA-wise.
As for the rest of the cell that starts the whole thing off, it will probably have to be a donor cell from a closely related bird. This probably means the result will have non-carrier-pigeon mitochondrial DNA.
On a related topic, if scientists figure out how to do this with birds then they replicate the process with humans, using human nuclear DNA, a non-human donor cell, and a non-human surrogate mother, will most countries of the world recognize the result as a "person" for legal reasons?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Organic matter decays over time, especially when it's not stored under "ideal conditions."
If you dug up 1500 people that had been dead and buried for 100 years, I bet you would have to work hard to get a sample of every stretch of the human DNA map. The only saving grace might be if the bodies were in a sealed casket or which were otherwise very well-preserved in a way that protected the DNA from decay.
On the other hand, if you stored 1500 freshly-dead people or birds today in a way to minimize DNA degradation and kept them that way for 100 years from now, our descendants in 2014 would have a much easier time with it, and that's not counting whatever technological advances come along over the next 100 years.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If birds were really smart, Chicken Run would be non-fiction.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Just what we need. More pigeons to crap on everything.
do we need to bring back this sub-species of flying rats?! As if there were not already way too many flying rats...ask anyone who lives in in a big city. Hell, we even have problems with them in a rural town of 27,000!!
Ain't technology great!
They were brought over from Europe.
So the passenger pigeons were replaced by European pigeons.
That's my understanding.
The species seems to have been susceptible to extinction from the get-go. Its not like humans wiped them out down to a last few flocks. People did over hunt them to be sure, but a species that required flock groups of tens to hundreds of thousands to propagate would seem to me to be living on borrowed time. Attempts to breed them in captivity failed because of the massive numbers that seem to be required. So this effort to reintroduce the population will require quite an effort, they will need a first generation in the tens of thousands at a minimum.
The Coen Brothers do an homage of Hitchcock perhaps.
They can't do this. They don't have the passenger pigeon DNA, not one copy, apparently, 100% intact, and you'd need dozens at LEAST to give you anything LIKE enough genetic variability for successive generations of the resurrected species to reproduce and create healthy, viable, not horribly deformed due to extreme inbreeding specimens. Unless you know the nucleotide base sequences that you're missing are IN FACT the same as the ones you're splicing in, even if your crime against nature, thing that should not be LIVES, it's not the same as what it was.
If I may be permitted an analogy, it'd be like finding a disc with the original Unix 1.0 on it, (or whatever, some early version) but there are bad sectors, and files that are at best corrupted, or even missing. You don't have the original source, nor a compiler capable of building from the source you don't have, nor can you reconstruct it EXACTLY how it was. Also, you no longer have any instances, nor instructions for how to build, ANY machine that COULD have run that first version of Unix.
So, you make a list of what's missing, and just #cp * them from a recent Debian GNU/Linux disc you have that has similar filenames, and directory structure.
Think that'd work? In actuality, it's more like building an executable with header files that are in a completely different programing language. Think THAT would work? And that's all BEFORE you address the problem that the original version was made to run on (pretend along with me here,) vacuum tubes, NOT transistors.
One more analogy, then I'll move on. Imagine if YOU died. Someone decides to resurrect you, but some of your DNA is missing, so they figure, "hey, a chimp is pretty close, right?" So they grab some chimpanzee DNA, and use sequences from THAT to rebuild your corpse, reanimate it, and pat themselves on the back and tell each other how awesome they all are for having brought YOU back to life. Well, no. They haven't. The result is not even CLOSE to who and what you were.
Now, about the "scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should" issue: whether or not you want to believe this, because of all the advertising effort spent convincing you otherwise, HUMAN BEINGS ARE NATURAL, AND EVERYTHING WE DO IS PART OF NATURE. If we're not, then beaver dams are ALSO not. Bee hives are not natural either, if we're not. You may call me mental, but everything is by definition either natural, or supernatural. The category, "artificial" is itself artificial, which is both ironic, and strangely appropriate. We used our NATURAL brains to figure out how to make fire and split atoms, how to throw rocks and fire intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are all natural, sorry to have to break it to any of you how are tree-humpers. A fake hip is just as natural as using a rock to bash apart another rock, or a shell to get at the contents. Birds use gravity and rocks to pop open tortoise shells, or turtles, whatever... this is all, in the strictest sense, NATURAL!!! So if as a natural process of our existence, other species around us die, well, so be-it. We probably shouldn't be DELIBERATELY trying to kill them, but if [whatever] all die, well, we are a species to be reckoned with, and just as we have historically had to adapt to others around us, so they must, if they want to survive, adapt to US if the want to see their kids be hatched or born or whatever, and grow up and have their own kids.
So they're gone, they should stay gone. Screwing around with the natural order was what killed them in the first place, the solution isn't MORE screwing around with forces they have NO WAY OF UNDERSTANDING, no matter how much they pretend to be experts, they simply DON'T KNOW, and should leave it well enough alone!
No one is thin enough to ride a passenger pigeons anymore...
The genocide of the native American Indian population was thought to have contributed to passenger pigeon's emergence as an outbreak species at populations which proved to be unsustainable. It is possible that during this time, the birds evolved their one egg per year, clustering and other behaviors which eventually contributed to their demise. One effect of the passenger pigeon's extinction is the spread of Lyme disease, another is the preservation of the American Bison.
Was the pigeon a passenger or did the pigeon carry a passenger?
This has been talked about for ages. The reason it's never done is their habitat is gone. They lived in old growth oak forests and there's none left now.
We can bring the species back and it might do ok in zoos, but they can't live in the wild any more - their wild is gone. We killed all the trees as well as all the birds.
All this cloning talk, where's the common sense? Close an extinct born with no food supply or habitat? Right.
Clone a mastodon? Right. What do you think can gestate a Mastadon? Not an elephant, too small. What's your next choice?
Need Mercedes parts ?