Colossal Biosciences Aims to ‘De-Extinct’ the Woolly Mammoth | Hacker News Reader

Colossal Biosciences Aims to ‘De-Extinct’ the Woolly Mammoth

blogs.nvidia.com

43 pointsbcaulfield56 comments

See my take on this here: https://www.readcodon.com/p/extinction

Basically, it will be quite challenging and I think they are over-promising on the timeline. They are also not even going to make a wooly mammoth, but rather a hairy elephant.

At a certain point a hairy elephant becomes a wolly mammoth, like the Quagga are no longer Zebra.

That depends on the evolutionary pressures it's subjected to; it can evolve in any number of ways.

The mammoth lived in an ecosystem that no longer exists: the mammoth steppes and all associated plants and wildlife. This is an important reason (perhaps even the main reason) they went extinct in the first place.

This is another problem with de-extinction for some species: what do you do with the animals once you've got them? For mammoths it's an open question if they could survive in the wild even if they're exact clones of the original, and even more so if they're "hairy elephants".

Either way, whatever will happen with these "hairy elephant", they most likely won't evolve in to mammoths as they existed 20,000 years ago.

I was just at the La Brea Tar Pits this weekend and wondered if the shorter tusks of elephants were an adaptation resulting from ivory harvesting. There is recent discussion of tuskless elephants due to poaching. They went from 15 to 9̶1̶ 51 percent of certain populations over the course of 15 years!

I think the numbers went from 15% to 33%, with 91 being the number of female elephants in the sample group. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/female-elephants-a... Per that article, tuskless male elephants don't survive, usually not even to birth.

Sorry, the number I had was 51% from New Scientist - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294549-female-african-...

Ah. TIL male African elephants must have tusks to be viable, but male Asian elephants can be tuskless, and in some regions up to 90% of male Asian elephants can be tuskless (per https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/asian-elephant).

Regarding the female African elephant percentage discrepancy, both of which seem to be pulled from the same paper, it seems 33% refers to new born and 51% refers to all females.

It's just such a waste of time, resources and talent, when it would be vastly better, and presumably easier, to stop the extinction of vaquita, black rhinoceros and other subspecies, saola, tiger species, leopard species, elephants and sub-species, gorillas and subspecies, orangutang, and hundreds of species of fish, frogs and insects. We don't need fake mammoth. Save the vaquita. And save the Amazon Rainforest, and whatever is left of every other forest.

The fantastic documentary “We Are As Gods” about Stewart Brand spends a considerable amount of time on this topic as he is involved in many of these efforts.

https://www.weareasgods.film/

This is all very nice and they’ve made lots of announcements and raised a lot of money.

Do it. Do something. Stop talking and deliver.

You have to hype to raise funds and hire. It also helps build a moat against competitors - it signals that the limited dollars are probably allocated and that competitors would have to expend energy working against you.

The hustle is real because often 100% research in a vacuum won't attain the activation energy it needs. Another possibility is that another team watching you might quickly follow and duplicate everything you've done and scale it faster than you.

Downside: if you fail, it can salt the earth for some years before a new team can start again.

We all see a lot of hucksters hyping themselves up and a lot of failures that never delivered. It's why we develop a callus against hype. But if you ever need it yourself, you shouldn't shy away from it. It's useful and serves a purpose.

> It also helps build a moat against competitors

Resurrecting a mammoth?

Once you have a mammoth, who needs a moat?

Apart from if this should happen, what is the thought process for choosing what to "de-extinct"? Marketability (large mammal vs tiny insect excites the populace more, leading to funding)? Viability (proximity to existing species genome means less work filling the gaps, quicker to market)? Biological disruption (some species easier to control than others)? Other?

Also, what geopolitical entity is willing to host the results? For example wooly mammoth might really appeal to tropical-based group, but must be hosted in sub-arctic region.

Probably all of the above, plus:

- Availability of genetic material (for extinct animals) can be widely variable. For something like mammoths, we've been able to extract genetic material from frozen arctic samples; one would have to assume that samples as large as mammoths are more likely to draw notice and researchers than, say, a preserved mosquito (Jurassic park notwithstanding).

- Proximity to existing species' reproductive biology: we know _a lot_ about how to manipulate reproductive processes in large placental mammals, and most of this sort of cloning is performed mechanically by harnessing the reproductive process of a host with similar biology (in this case presumably by implanting an embryo in a modern elephant for gestation).

> Marketability (large mammal vs tiny insect excites the populace more, leading to funding)?

Conservationists often leverage the concept of "Charismatic Megafauna"[0] to serve as splashy poster children for broader, more practical efforts.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna

What about all those other species of Hominid?

^^^this. I would find this infinitely more interesting than cloning a wooly mammoth or a dinosaur.

That seems like it would get really awkward fast. We'd probably have to give them full human rights (particularly if they successfully learned our language and demanded rights), but they might not be able to adapt to a homo sapien society. Also whoever funded their recreation wouldn't be able to keep them as property, but would probably try to.

Mammoths are easier in this regard since we already have a framework for how to treat elephants.

I do not think we are morally sophisticated enough, as a society/species, to handle that without it going to shit.

Weird that the Long Now project has basically made no progress on its own de-extinction efforts since 2012.

However, it seems like they have made some worthwhile contributions in terms of conserving populations of existing wild pachyderms (a more useful undertaking in general, imho) by partially sequencing the elephant herpes virus, etc.

https://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-mammoth/history-of...

Does this provide any new information or updates to any of the previous posts about Colossal’s mammoth plans over the last several years? It just sounds like a press release for Nvidia to highlight their connection to it. (I get a little more cynical every few months I see something about Colossal without any actual updates…)

Where would it live? I assume like many mammals, it needs to be raised and taught by its parents. Are they gonna drive up to the Canadian border and just dump it off?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park seems like a good option

There was a good Oxford style debate on NPR about whether resurrecting the mammoth is a good idea. The most interesting point I heard _against_ doing something like this was along these lines:

If we were to use an elephant mother host to grow the fetus, once the mammoth is born, it is possible the herd will immediately recognize the baby as an anomaly and abandon it. Thus, this child is born into a world of suffering, not just for the herd that rejects it, but for the individual who is raised alone with no family, possibly by humans only. What will we do when the next one is born? Just put the two individuals in a space together and hope for the best?

De-extincting such a creature carries additional costs we don't know how to quantify. Once that first, lonely, individual is sexually mature, will it even want to mate? Will it have the social skills to accept other future artificially-born mammoths as part of its herd? We have no way of "recreating" the social environment a mammoth would need to thrive in order to bring a self-sustaining herd of the species into balanced existence.

A wooly mammoth calf will look similar enough to an elephant calf that this would not be an issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/13/firm-bring-b...

That's a claim they made without any evidence to support it, which is a troubling trend with this team. Personally I see them as engaging in unethical behavior by their misleading statements like that one where they genuinely can't know whether the hybrid would be rejected.

Sure - I was just providing the link so one could see what a wooly mammoth calf might look like. Elephants are extremely bonded and very caring of their/their group's young, they take care of sick or injured elephants in their group - clearly there is no evidence for how an elephant would behave but I have my suspicion that a mammoth calf born would be readily accepted.

Is an optimistic suspicion _enough_ to risk inflicting a lifetime of suffering if our suspicion was completely wrong on multiple levels? Even if the genes we splice work as expected, do we know they correctly produce an individual who can correctly socially mature?

And of course, my next favorite argument from the anti-resurrection team was, "ok, we've produced a herd of socially functioning individuals who can reproduce and grow their own population. How long until we start using them for food again or straight up industrially farming them?"

Well, we could just euthanize the mammoth. These concerns didn't stop us from cloning dolly, or doing hundreds of other genetic experiments. Or millions of other instances of animal testing.

On the eve of being able to reverse extinction itself, the progressive/environmentalist/animal-rights-advocates crawled so far up their own asses that it became morally unacceptable to even try.

You can't make this shit up, it's absolutely hilarious.

Fools laugh at what they don't understand. To begin with, a formal debate requires exploring arguments against the proposition for the side that is assigned to oppose it.

Of all the extinct species you might attempt to resurrect, a mammoth is about the least economical option because when things go wrong (as they do) every problem will be massively expensive. If it gets born successfully but develops a health problem that requires surgery of some sort? $10,000 minimum. There will likely be a string of very expensive problems.

Maybe it would be wiser to start with something a little more manageable, like an extinct dog breed - we understand dogs better than we do elephants, for obvious reasons. There's a long list of extinct animals, most of which are a lot more manageable than woolly mammoths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_species

Are you judging that from the one photo of a 10,000 year old preserved carcass that looks like a baby elephant?

I don't know what features elephants use to tell their calves apart, but in an alternate universe I would bet that elephants would say the same about a 10,000 old preserved carcass of a baby Homo Habilis and us.

Yes, and from being somewhat familiar with the behavior of elephants. I'm not saying my hunch has any basis to it, but if I was thinking about investing in Colossal Biosciences, calf rejection from the birth mother would be very low on my list of concerns.

In that alternate universe, I suspect that 99% of mothers would not just leave their newly birthed baby out in the elements to die if it happened to be a homo habilis

Is there any evidence of this sort of acceptance between African and Asian elephants (say, in zoos)? I wouldn't be surprised if that had been attempted, and they appear further removed from one another than mammoths and Asian elephants are.

There was a zoo crossbred elephant. I think Motty was its name. It didn’t survive long after birth. But it shows that African and Asian elephants will breed at least, which implies they’d probably raise a mismatched calf.

Asian and African elephants are both commonly carriers for a virus (different strains of EEHV) which is very deadly to elephant calves of the other species. They used to be housed together more often before zoologists figured this out.

That seems wildly optimistic to me. Suppose they look the same but they smell quite different? I'm thinking this is something we would be largely oblivious to but that an elephant would not, for reasons I hope are obvious.

Well, the calf would have spent 22 months in the uterus of the mother, and passed through the mother's birth canal. I suspect anything spending that much time there would smell approximately similar. Also, I find it unlikely that the elephant is doing some "does it smell like an elephant" test on the thing that it knows it just birthed. Maybe some creatures with less intelligence might actually behave that way, because they might be happy eating the babies of an unrelated mother of the same species, but don't want to eat their own. But I suspect elephants don't have that evolutionary pressure, especially considering that they help raise the calves of other members of their group, and have been known to adopt orphaned baby elephants that they're presented with in one way or another.

There are observed cases of mammals raising a different species of mammal, including wet-nursing them, so it does not seem to be the problem it's purported to be.

Starting in Siberia, Pleistocene Park.

Interesting question. I know the'll IVF an elephant (this is speculation) which I assume will raise it to an extent (though they could bottle feed I guess... thats a lot of milk). Mammoths are pack animals so I guess they'll need a bunch of them before they're released.

https://colossal.com/pleistocene-park-return-of-the-mammoths...

If it is anything like an elephant, it would live in a herd. Just bringing a single one into this world seems somewhat cruel.

I thing that mammoth is a really poor choice for de-extinction. I would wish to be wrong, but is not a really well matured plan.

How about the auroch? Its extinction is much more recent, so presumably the available DNA is in much better shape.

When talking about recency, how about the dodo or great auk?

I suggested the auroch because it was a keystone species in many European ecosystems up until recently. So it could have a major impact on any rewilding project.

What available DNA? We have some really well-preserved frozen mammoths as DNA sources... frozen aurochs, not so many. Or any, that I know of.

Yes, but DNA has a half-life of around 500 years. So there is a considerable difference between an animal that went extinct in the 1600s, and another 4000 years ago.

Megalodon instead?

Charismatic gigafauna

I bet a non-negligible portion of their funding comes from people who want to shoot one and have a trophy that few or no others are able to obtain.

I wonder how it would taste, given our ancestors' hankering for their meat.

You can find out for $30 plus shipping:

https://shop.minimuseum.com/products/mammoth-meat

"We recommend keeping it in the jar at all times as it can be fragrant when exposed."

That reminds me of the guy that cooked some giant squid that washed ashore (which had never been seen outside of carcasses when this interview was done) and ended up researching why it tasted so bitter https://youtu.be/0z5oziSqQOs?t=703

So there may be some scientific value? I am NOT volunteering.

Mix elephant meat with a generous dose of lard in a pan. My bet would be that not much different.

They should go big and do a dinosaur

can a dinosaur live in our less oxygen rich air

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