Now, new species are often disruptive in lots of ways. No reason to think an old one, reintroduced, would be less disruptive. But no mention of real issues like that.
I think the writer was just fishing for something provocative to say.
“Both Asian and African elephants, which Colossal plans to use as surrogates to grow mammoth calves, are endangered, and every elephant gestating a "mammoth" calf can't grow babies of its own. "That's going to reduce population size," Lynch said.“
We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to try to bring back these past species.
If, as I've been told, grasslands are a better carbon sink than taiga, and mammoths are capable of converting the latter into the former, I'm hopeful for efforts like this.
For instance, existing elephants are already obnoxious destructive animals to have roaming a landscape inhabited by people. It's only fair to include that in the analysis. All part of the equation.
Somebody wanted to reintroduce wolves to Iowa but that got squashed by popular objection. Everyone would have been at risk.
There are probably bigger risks from large deer populations, like Lyme disease, but also other ways of reducing deer populations. And are there other ways of spooking them if that's all it takes to make them more wary of automobiles?
Each year, they account for 59,000 human injuries, 440 human deaths and more than $10 billion in economic loses.
Well, if the currently endangered species go extinct, we'll have the technology to bring them back too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> For one, de-extinct animals may be sickly, given that the pool of available DNA for each species is relatively small.
> It's also worth considering who would be liable if large-scale mammoth reintroductions went wrong.
> Reintroductions can lead to clashes between humans and wildlife.
> The makeup of the reintroduced population matters too
> There's also no guarantee that animals will stay where we release them
I have the impression that while each single point may be unlikely, there are (too) many unknowns in the project.
In addition to the biological objections, there are the ideological ones, primarily:
> Instead of using that money to bring back three extinct species whose ecological impact is unknown, the funds could be put toward saving roughly 100 species that are currently facing an uncertain future
I agree that this is ultimately purely driven by profit:
> "If they're successful — and I have no doubt that they will be — they're going to make a ton of money," he said.
If we have to revive something elephant-related, then I'd much prefer them to concentrate on (one of) the Madagascan elephant bird species. The eggs alone would offer a potentially robust revenue stream for whichever God bought the beast back from the dead.
Funny how any effort to arrest the runaway catastrophe that's been caused is met with resistance that calls it 'further damage'. Like we aren't already facing tremendous risks by leaving it unchecked.
Save existing species, go right ahead. That the effort being made to do {absolutely anything else} takes money too, is no kind of argument whatsoever. The aren't exclusive activities.
The risk to elephants in using them for this is a real concern though.
Some humans do on a single continent which has a human population density half that of Eurasia, and even that not particularly smoothly:
https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_spec...
Unlike a zebra muscle which one it’s in your local lake goooooood luck ever removing them and now your lake may die a toxic blue green algae death
If it turned out that mammoths were actually a problem, we'd never agree to actually control the population.
It matters from a Chesterton's Fence perspective: We know that the hippos were not brought for any good reason, inevitability, etc.
We do that all the time of course. But I'd kinda like to take at least a moment to consider how we minimize suffering before we plunge ahead.
We know elephants are very intelligent, emotional, and social animals. I see no reason to assume mammoths are significantly different. And of course what they're working aren't even mammoths, more like "hairy elephants".
Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in captivity would consign it to a miserable life of loneliness. It would be nothing short of cruel.
So you managed to clone a herd of hairy elephants, then what do you do with those? The mammoth steppes they once roamed no longer exist. There is no ecosystem to save or improve because that ecosystem is gone. That's what they meant with "what's gone is gone".
Can you just re-introduce them to the wild? These are huge animals that need a lot of space. Other animals and people live there. You can't just have a bit of land; you need a huge amount of it.
Cloning mammoths is just dumb. None of the logistics really work out and a bunch of mammoths spending miserable lonely lives in zoos is basically the best-case outcome we can hope for and after a few decades of this everyone will all realize it was pointless and mammoths will be extinct once more. All these notions are rekindling a lost ecosystem are nothing more than flights of fancy.
For some other animals there is perhaps a slightly better case to be made; I don't know. But for mammoths the case is pretty bad.
Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants. Small elephants bond also with humans.
Would it be that easy?
Imagine a handful of wild humans, having never had any contact with other humans, no education or anything, just put somewhere and left to themselves.
How many centuries would they need to even develop an actual language?
They might very well be totally unable to cooperate or survive at all, without a preexisting society to guide them.
Even if they don't have societies as developed at humans do, I can imagine the same would happen to different degrees with elephants, mammoths, dolphins, crows even.
> How many centuries would they need to even develop an actual language?
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sig... https://www.nature.com/articles/34646
I'd say less than 0.1 centuries.