'Alien scene' of tadpoles feast

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12 pointsmalvosenior2 comments

I've always wondered why we wait so long to take the animals into captivity and breed them manually. It seems like as soon as a species looked like it might be in danger of extinction, a couple should be captured and breed- just in case.

Breeding two animals is practically useless - the gene pool would be too undiversified, and populations which have been brought back from the brink by such techniques have a bunch of problems.

More to the point, the numbers are overwhelming. Thousands of vertebrate species are threatened, not to mention plants and insects which are probably even more valuable to the ecosystem - for example there's no point saving the koala if eucalyptus goes extinct, because there will be nothing for the koala to eat.

See: http://dodosgone.blogspot.com/2007/06/extinction-rate-estima... for some numbers.

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