Animal Cloning

Cloning is so technically difficult (every species is different !) and so expensive that it will remain an unrealistic technique for decades. For now, the only endangered animals were very close relatives of the domestic horse, cow and goat (not sure abut the last one).

Only in Hollywood movies a single scientist takes a couple of test tubes and in few years has lots of animals of different species!

 

Black-Footed Ferret | Revive & Restore

The organization that helped clone the horse wants to try and do the same thing with black footed ferrets.

 

Is this even needed at all? Isn't there plenty of breeding stock for both the ferret and the horse? Is inbreeding a known problem in these populations?

 

Both of these species hit a low of only a handful of remaining specimens when they went extinct in the wild. I believe the article (or at least one of the articles on the horse cloning) specified that only 10 horses genes are in the current population and this cloned male's genes had died off.

~Thylo

 

Yeah, even if they're not facing problems yet, it's probably going to be a big issue in the future.

 

Congrats to them. Working on existing endangered species is probably a safer and less expensive approach as trying to revive long extinct species is already a headache.

Here they are with mammoth DNA and not one person succeeded in cloning a fully living specimen yet.

 

You say that like any of this is an easy feat

~Thylo

 

Which it isn’t.

Other candidates like passenger pigeons and dodos may have living relatives to work with, though it wouldn’t a perfect match like the original.

And the real impossibly would definitely be dinosaurs. But that’s for the best. No one would control a living Tyrannosaurus without a few casualties.

 

The issue with births is that they lay eggs, which are much harder to produce in a laboratory. Sadly, it's doubtful there's any usable Dodo DNA left to clone with, certainly not enough to create a population.

I doubt a real dinosaur would be that much more difficult to control than today's strongest zoo residents tbh. They were animals after all, not movie monsters.

~Thylo

 

It would depend on the dinosaur, but if it's comparable in size to a modern zoo animal I agree. I'm thinking a large sauropod would be a serious challenge to control.

 

Yeah they would probably be the biggest challenge, based on size alone. Could we build a fence strong enough to contain them? Absolutely. Is that economically feasible? Nope.

~Thylo

 

Food costs could be an issue too. And of course if you want to provide a higher standard of care, the costs just get higher. What if the species needs large social groups to be happy? Some of the larger sauropods probably had pretty long lifespans, so if they do well enough in captivity they'd have to be cared for for a very long time. Even if you charge to allow the public to see the animals, you wouldn't be able to offset the costs of care despite the high demand. I'm getting off topic but ya'll really got me thinking about the logistics of an extinct animal zoo/theme park again lol.

 

Big dinosaurs eat big prey. So yeah, providing for them in zoos will be highly difficult.

Cloning of existing endangered species would be a great plan worth focusing on. Maybe only clone the less feasible extinct ones when it’s needed in the far future.