Scientists are working to bring the woolly mammoth back
popularmechanics.com
popularmechanics.com
I'd love to see a mammoth but I think it's specious reasoning they'd be functionally important in tractable time. Building up a herd in an animal with slow gestation takes decades
We can clone them in numbers, no need to wait for the nature.
There's no true "minimum viable population size" as far as we know, just a continuum of increasing extinction risk as the effective population size decreases.
For most vertebrates, it’s as low as 2. For some species, it could be 1. Definitely more than 0.
Such a behaviour might be a way to increase genetic diversity while populations are tiny.
Note that tiny populations can occur frequently when the environment has millions of barriers between tiny populations - eg. a water dwelling creature living in millions of tiny pools and unable to pass from one pool to the next until there is a major flood, which might only be once per thousand years.
As the population grows larger you will see an increase in diversity due to the quirks of sexual reproduction. Also, we can just keep creating new lines of individuals and mixing them into the herd. A single bull would be able to mate with a ton of cows giving you maximum bang for your DNA buck.
The hardest part would be creating a healthy animal in the first place. Once you can do that, the rest is almost trivial in comparison. After that you can even do in-vitro testing of zygotes to select healthy stock. Especially considering how valuable they would be.
"Mother" nature has one timetable which can't be altered. An elephant pregnancy lasts 18-22 months. And, a herd (assuming its Matriachal like elephants) will need to establish a dominance, and a matriarch. That will be a decade or more down the line: You can't lead a herd as a teenager.
An elephant typically gives birth every 4-5 years. So, you need multiple cycles to establish a family. This process probably needs a lot of sisters and aunties to work, they're complex social societies.
(shared a house with a Botswanian wildlife ranger decades ago, He said nothing about African herd animals is simple)
Like adding ‘machine learning’ to a project, it’s a buzzword that helps raise interest and cash. No rational justification required! Tenuous conjecture is welcome because it is so easy to justify and is so hard to argue.
If humans and mice share 85% DNA, how useful are these metrics?
But the Python interpreter is identical. The Python stdlib is identical. libc is identical. The Linux kernel is identical.
Your 20k lines of Python code is a small part of this all, and most Python programs are probably >99% identical when you count it all up. Of course, this is not really all that meaningful of a number.
``` def get_neanderthal () ## Retrieves 2% of the your genome ```
Has been implemented hundreds of different times by hundreds of different developers. If you cat and uniq their Neanderthal implementations together:
``` def global_get_neanderthal(): ## Retrieves 20% of a consensus genome ```
Reintroducing it into the wild? How is that a good idea?
Something something climate change? They went extinct because the pre-Industrial climate shifted. It doesn't even make nonsense; it's just word salad.
"These islands were full of mammoth bones, and the quantity of tusks and teeth of elephants and rhinoceroses, found in the newly discovered island of New Siberia, were perfectly amazing, and surpassed anything which had as yet been discovered.... Hedenstrőm started from Ustyansk, near the mouth of the Yana, on March 19th, 1809, taking with him two companions, and for three consecutive seasons they examined the islands.
Hedenstrőm found that the quantity of fossil ivory on the first island found by Liakoff (i.e., Liakoffs Island) was so enormous, that, although the ivory diggers had been engaged in collecting ivory from it for forty years, the supply seemed to be quite undiminished."
https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2019/08/19/alaskan-muck-ivor...
It's a long and forgotten story (from more than a century ago)... these might help:
1. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Healthy_cloned_monkeys_born_in_...
The only reason nobody has (that we know about) is because of the ethical concerns. That and what real utility does human cloning give if you can't have a replica with your same age, skills, and experience?
What utility does cloning any anime give you if you can't have a replica with the same age, skills, and experience?
https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-clone-a-mammoth-the-scie...
* https://colossal.com/mammoth/
The following statement from the same page appears to be their support for the claim that bringing the mammoth back from extinction will benefit the environment:
>The loss of these large cold-tolerant Mammoths over the past 10,000 years has stripped this ecosystem of the grasslands that once efficiently absorbed carbon. Instead, there are mossy forests and wetlands, which aren’t as helpful with combating rising temperatures. However, if the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem could be revived, it could help in reversing the rapid warming of the climate and more pressingly, protect the arctic’s permafrost - one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs.
>Re-establishing an ecosystem filled with grasslands will help to create a cycle that prevents the thaw and release of stored greenhouse gases within the arctic permafrost. With cold-tolerant elephant mammoth hybrids grazing the grasslands and roaming comfortably during the winters, they scrape away layers of snow, so that the cold air can reach the soil. This also allows grasslands to thrive and since they’re lighter than forestry, the snow won’t melt as quickly. Making way for another benefit - a surface that reflects the Sun’s radiation.
Two main feeding behaviors do this: 1) stripping whole branches and bark which kills the tree; 2) uprooting the trees and eating the roots.
Presumably mammoths could be similar...
And these people want to introduce mammoths? What is their plan here, when we can’t even reintroduce non-extinct species to their old habitats?
Also, grasslands are the most endangered habitat in the world, but it isn’t because of a lack of mammoths: it’s because we build our farms and cities and highways in grassland areas. If we had 4x as much grassland, farmers would just claim it. Fescue grass (I forget the spelling) barely can be found these days outside of national parks
This makes very little sense to me. They seem to be comparing this to the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, but we did that less than a hundred years after we exterminated them, so the other species in the ecosystem were still the same ones that co-evolved with the wolves. The wooly mammoth has instead been extinct for over 4000 years—at this point won't reintroducing it be more akin to introducing a new species, with all the ecosystem risks involved in such an endeavor?
> The loss of these large cold-tolerant Mammoths over the past 10,000 years has stripped this ecosystem of the grasslands that once efficiently absorbed carbon. Instead, there are mossy forests and wetlands, which aren’t as helpful with combating rising temperatures. [0]
It seems like the most likely outcome is the mammoths don't take. If they do take, it's pretty hubristic to assume that we'll get grasslands back instead of just ruining the ecosystems that do exist there now.
This is one of these things that you keep hearing about but never comes to completion. Like human teeth regrowth, or graphene.
I actually hope I am totally wrong!
The mammoth genome and Asian elephant genome will be much more divergent in non-coding sequence than in protein-coding sequence, so the reference to 99.9% similarity figure in the original post is an inaccurate and highly ascertainment bias. And yes, non-coding sequence differences will matter for phenotype difference.
If they are lucky they will end up with a hairy Asian elephant, but it won’t know what to do or how to survive in Alaska or Finland.
The evolution and divergence of species involves much more than just tweaking a few protein-coding genes. Thinking otherwise without proof of principle in much more tractable species (rodents, flys, arabidopsis, corn) is genetic hubris.
I'll believe that when pigs fly...