The once-extinct aurochs may soon roam Europe again
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
That tree isn't completely dead -- some stumps and shoots remain -- but adult trees never survive, due to a fungus that didn't used to exist in North America.
There are now two programs to bring it back. One, by hybridizing with Japanese Chestnut and breeding to (hopefully) keep not much more than the Japanese tree's blight resistance. And another -- more controversially but maybe actually better -- that adds to the American Chestnut genome a single gene, from wheat, that confers resistance to the fungus. These latter trees would be even more like the originals.
The hybrid program has some test sites now in the wild. The GMO version has not been approved, but I hope it will be.
Two things about the American chestnut are relevant: 1) the percentage of forest it occupied is widely overstated, seemingly due to exageration thru retelling of the story. It was usually a top ten tree at most sites, far from the numbers you usually see in articles. The these numbers are from ideal sites for its colonization or areas where it was planted by humans. This is widely known and studied, but people who write about it to lay audiences tend to use exaggerated figures out of context.
2) many specimens survived the blight due to partial resistance, not all were wiped out.
All we need to do is wait and they'll do just fine. Even a traditional breeding program would work in a few generations, there's really no good reason to rush this stuff.
Pretty sure you'll find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi12xaJxA5U saying the same thing about the Chestnut.
Humans are really good at throwing environmental pressure (logging) after environmental pressure (chestnut blight) after environmental pressure (urban air pollution) after environmental pressure (global warming) at species. The speed with which these pressures arise is faster than natural selection can deal with for most species, and are leading to an extinction event rather than species just learning to adapt. If we can make minor direct genetic modifications to help species cope, I think it's an unqualified win.
Stripped of that, it says "the new gene will be in the tree's the gene pool forever, so it's a bad idea" which is a non-sequitur. Putting the gene in permanently, for permanent fungus resistance, is the point, isn't it?
The emotional appeal is the entire argument. It seems to imply that gene editing is always "bad and dirty". There might be a case to be made that putting this particular gene in this tree is a bad idea, but this sentence is really not it (1). I think that I had an emotional reaction against it ;)
IMHO Gene editing is too broad a category to judge like that. Comments on the internet - good, bad or useless? It depends on what you write, and where.
If someone is going to ask for "comment with evidence", then do not reverse the burden of proof (1) and put that on "downvoters", instead ask for "sources" that all gene editing is "contamination", rather than giving a free pass to sneaking in the conclusion via loaded language, without supporting evidence.
I think that I gave this topic more in-depth examination than it deserved, but there you go.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
1) resistance genes are already in the genome, they don't need to be added. This means the entire endeavor is unnecessary
2) this is an internationally recognized definition of genetic pollution, it's controversial only with a few hardliners.
2. If you read the wikipedia article [1], it has an entire section on why it's controversial. It also has links to an article on genetic rescue[2], which I think is more relevant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_pollution#Controversy
So what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut#Surviving_sp...
Basically, there's 2 ways to bring these trees back to blight range (or something approximating them). Method 1 is hybridization route with Chinese chestnut, method 2 is genetically modified route using a single wheat protein gene to confer resistance. Method 2 needs approval and there was a request for comment open a couple years about it.
The American Chestnut is "functionally extinct", because despite the fact that they are somewhat prominent throughout their native habitat as adolescents, they rarely (if ever) are able reach maturity and develop fruit (and therefore can't reproduce).
Here are a few pics of some adolescent chestnuts if anyone is curious:
- https://unsplash.com/photos/O9q1p_9bji0
- https://unsplash.com/photos/0s7_4fm8y-g
Bovine-led biodiversity: For millions of years, European land has been grazed – by wild herbivores, and, far more recently, by domestic cattle. This grazing has kept parts of the land free from forest, providing open habitats that support a wide range of plants and animals.
But today a decline in animal husbandry across Europe means these habitats, and their biodiversity, are in danger of disappearing. This is where the auroch, or its descendant – the so-called “Tauros” – comes in. Through selective breeding, Rewilding Europe and its partners want Tauros to occupy the niche the auroch once filled, keeping Europe’s rich mosaic of open landscapes flourishing through natural grazing.
These are cow ancestors that went extinct in 1627 and had as little 0.12% genetic distance from current cow breeds. This sounds reminiscent of bison/wolf reintroduction or the more dramatic goal of bringing mammoths back to the tundra. I'm pretty near 100% supportive of all these efforts. The holocene has been an absolute catastrophe for megafauna and we're increasingly realizing this has had dramatically negative downstream consequences for other species and even landscape and climate.
I find it really unserious the people comparing this to like, bringing back velociraptors and t-rex. They're being back-bred via existing cows, there's not even any "genetic engineering" as such. As far as I know no one's planning to reintroduce Smilodon to the Appalachian Trail - beyond maybe a few exceptions, I say bring back the megafauna.
[1] https://rewildingeurope.com/rewilding-in-action/wildlife-com...
We could start a letter-writing campaign?
Every joke has some truth in it: we have a chicken - a very viable candidate to back-bred dino. Well, either that or we can have a giant chicken, that might strike fear in everybody. Though, cassowaries also are frightening enough.
For what it's worth, there is something way easier than trying to breed back extinct species - bring back wolves [1]. Sadly though, outside of national parks farmers don't like apex predators like wolves because they like to snack on farm animals... and farmers don't like to invest into herd protection either with humans or with animals, because the profit margins don't allow that.
[1]: https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-r...
Cats are a fairly young family of carnivores. They're surprisingly closely related to eachother with some surprising hybridisation potential.
It might not be that far fetched.
Do English (and derivatives) natives agree that both words sound the same?
However they are both unusual and unfamiliar, so people might get them confused anyway.
Is that a math error? 100%-0.12% = 99.88%. Should it have said "more than a 99% overlap" or "more than a 99.8% overlap"? I guess more than 98% overlap is still technically true.
So, when faced with an unclear Hebrew word for an animal that no English speaker would have ever seen or heard of, and one that represented a wild, horned quadruped, the translators seemingly took the sensible choice of recycling a word that readers and listeners would be familiar with, at the expense of a taxonomic accuracy that was not available to them.
I thought the King James Version was translated into English from Greek (which was translated from Hebrew).
I mention it because, if true, the opportunity for “lost in translation” is greater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version
>The word “unicorn” appears in the King James Version nine times – in Numbers 23:22 and 24:8, Deuteronomy 33:17, Job 39:9,10, Psalms 22:21, 29:6 and 92:10 and in Isaiah 34:7.
https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/on_the_front_lines_of_t...
Those listed books are all in the (non-Apocrypha) Old Testament, meaning they were translated form Hebrew and/or Aramaic.
At least some of this is the background for the excellent movie “The Zookeeper’s Wife” starring Jessica Chastain
If a back breeding projects target appearance, does behaviour generally follow behaviour serendipitously? Will these behave like aurochs?
It swerved at the last minute and ran alongside my car for about 10s. All I could see out the side window was its legs, felt like being next to a dinosaur.
They do!
I was walking in the hills above Drammen one midsummer night and found myself suddenly about two metres from one, not sure which of us was the most surprised; we stared at each other for a few moments and then it lumbered off through the woods.
Those are moose not elk, the Norwegian word elg translates to moose in english. Elk is a species of large North-American deer (hjort). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk
Closest I've had to a Jurassic Park moment...
The Irish elk stood about 2.1 m (6 ft 11 in) tall at the shoulders and carried the largest antlers of any known deer, a maximum of 3.65 m (12.0 ft) from tip to tip and 40 kg (88 lb) in weight. For body size, at about 450–600 kg (990–1,300 lb) and up to 700 kg (1,500 lb) or more, the Irish elk was the heaviest known cervine ("Old World deer"); and tied with the extant Alaska moose (Alces alces gigas) as the third largest known deer, after the extinct Cervalces latifrons and Cervalces scotti.
It was not just native to Ireland, but many skeletons were found preserved in Irish peat bogs. The Irish elk had a far-reaching range, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to Lake Baikal in the East.
Urbanites was a bit un-called for.
Now that the beaver has destroyed the road foundation several times and the public had to pay for it, over and over, the mood of the sub-urban dwellers is slowly shifting. Turns out wildlife is not so cute, if you have to pay out of pocket for it.
Maybe the road has to move. It's going to cost money to repair come what may, so maybe shifting it is the answer. I don't know, I just want to point out you're making huge assumptions about what the right answer IS, and also using "my specific therefore defines the general as wrong" arguments. Sure. Your brother had a bad beaver experience. European farmers who lost land to water runoff from bare hills are taking a different view.
So, maybe is not the bloodbath that many people assume
Now the hippopotamus... that is an animal widely feared in Africa. They may look fat and silly and eat plants, but they give no fucks, and will charge and trample you without a second thought.
https://scoutlife.org/features/161345/7-animal-myths-that-ev...
But definitely keep your distance from hippos, the most dangerous animal in Africa. They kill hundreds to thousands of people per year.
> When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.
> My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain.
> In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.
> When I was 9 years old, a solitary lion prowled villages near my home. After it killed a few chickens, some goats and finally a cow, we were warned to walk to school in groups and stop playing outside. My sisters no longer went alone to the river to collect water or wash dishes; my mother waited for my father and older brothers, armed with machetes, axes and spears, to escort her into the bush to collect firewood.
> The lion sucked the life out of the village: No one socialized by fires at night; no one dared stroll over to a neighbor’s homestead.
> When the lion was finally killed, no one cared whether its murderer was a local person or a white trophy hunter, whether it was poached or killed legally. We danced and sang about the vanquishing of the fearsome beast and our escape from serious harm.
> And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren
The reason that most harm inflicted by lions is economic or secondary is that people go well out of their way to avoid meeting lions. That doesn't represent a small problem; it represents a gigantic problem.
I live in Sweden. The topic of a wolf crossing borders with Norway where the conservation laws are different comes up every few years. The attitude of people in different countries to wolves (or any topic of the day really) gets discussed.
Wolf attacks are a nearly irrelevant problem. Older generations are irrationally/disproportionately afraid of wolf attacks.
People saved by wolves aka dogs: countless.
Story changes, when all the easily hunted deer is gone and a harsh winter comes. Once the hunt success without retaliation is there - it all goes south fast.
There are indeed many known cases when rabid wolves have attacked humans, but obviously there are far less such cases than the attacks due to rabid dogs or even rabid foxes, because there are much more dogs than wolves.
In the past, there have also been many cases when humans have died due to other causes, mainly due to cold, then wolves have eaten the dead bodies and when they were found the death has been wrongly attributed to wolves.
I have grown in an Eastern European country, with much more wolves than in any Western European country.
Nevertheless, at least during the last century, there has been known absolutely no case of a human attacked by wolves, with the exception of attacks due to solitary rabid wolves, which could be fatal when not treated immediately.
Of course there were a very large number of cases of sheep or other domestic animals which were eaten by wolves.
On the other hand, bears or wild boars will not hesitate to attack humans in certain circumstances, so they belong to a completely different group of animals from this point of view.
Want to bring it back and keep it in an animal sanctuary? Sure.
Free roaming herds in Europe? No thanks.
He wasn't keen to let me past, or hurry up, so I had to retreat and wait.
They don't seem to be significantly larger than a moose of which there are plenty roaming Northern Europe.
I mean, come on. At last your nerd skills enable you to save the day in an action motion picture. Get to your feet and cheer for the Unix prompt on a Connection Machine.
I think you are right about the SGI workstation being used with the CM in the background.
But still, I was disappointed that I was the only person in the theater that was stoked about Unix at the time.
The CM-5 simply ran it's own Unix called CMost, and you'd generally rlogin into it from another Unix machine.
In all these cases you could submit batch jobs with NQS (a unix batch system), but you could partition the machine and interactively access it as well, and at the same time as other users or batch jobs.
I just don't see why you would want to do this. They're gone, leave them be.
Should we bring back every single species that has ever gone extinct? Or only every one that existed while humans are in the fossil record?
What I think it comes down to is humans don't handle change well, but trying to make the earth stand still is a fools errand.
Your statement (which is a rather incomplete picture of you, granted), suggests that you don't see much of a connection between yourself and the rest of the living world. Easy enough trap to fall into, the connection is usually not conscious and few people pay attention to it.
But when one does realize that one is in fact part of the world, the loss of a species is as tragic as a personal loss. Because it is.
So, by analogy, say you had lost 2/3rds of your possessions due to some human-mediated act, and someone were to say to you "They are gone, leave them be, no need to restore them"...
or, since possessions usually can be restored, say 1/4 of your closest friends and relatives were, oh, let's just say 'put into prison', to imply that they could be brought back, would the answer be "They are gone, leave them be. No need to have my friends and family back"?
Or if that is still too removed, we could start talking about body parts.
again, my apologies, I wish only good things for you and your loved ones. The thought of bad things happening to them is abhorrent.
And so is the mass extinction that we are all participating in, myself included.
It would be one thing to try to restore a species that went extinct recently, something that maybe played a crucial role in a dying ecosystem. But something that's been extinct for so long that it's only documentation is in ancient text, something which has living descendants right now by the billions, and in a place where the landscape has long since adapted to the current biodiversity and is already largely a human influenced landscape, it doesn't make sense to me. Bringing back extinct rhino species, or bird species, or reptile species in places where they flourished recently enough that their presence is missed by the biome, that makes a lot of sense. To me this is like bringing back the wooly mammoth, it's rationalized with practicality but in reality it's just a novelty.
I hear that deer meat, that free-roam and are wild, is tight and bitter. Cow and chicken, that do not move much, tend to be tender, and fat-rich.
I'd venture a guess and say its like deer meat, or maybe bear meat, which I tried once and was disgusting; tight, foul-y, and dry.
They only don't move much because of intensive farming practices that pack them into small places to prevent movement (partly for cost efficiency, but also because Westerners have become accustomed to this mild flavour profile).
If you let your cows and chickens range free and don't supplement their feed, they tend to be lean, heavily muscled, strongly flavoured, and often pretty damn tough.
Anyway, grass fed pasture beef is a bit leaner, does have a strong flavour, but the tender cuts are still tender. It's not close to grass fed lamb w.r.t. gaminess.
Old egg laying hens are tougher and have thicker skin, yes. Just put them in a stew.