Scientists are working to bring the woolly mammoth back

by marcodiego • 3 years ago

102 75 3 years ago

Tao3300• 3 years ago

On one hand it would be amazing to revive an extinct species, but the reasons given seem like crap.

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.

dotnet002• 3 years ago

Well, since we're all speaking in hypotheticals anyway, if recreated Mammoths start being a problem, we're even more capable of wiping them out than last time.

Vecr• 3 years ago

.50 SLAP out of a Barret should work quite well, right? Someone should make a new version of Footfall without all the fudd lore.

BurningFrog• 3 years ago

I think the more common theory is that our distant ancestors hunted them to extinction.

BirAdam2• 3 years ago

Yeah. The last mammoths died just 4000ya. They were on a remote island with no ppl.

8bitsrule• 3 years ago

There were so many remains in the Siberian north, the 'hunting to extinction' doesn't work in the Arctic. Given the voluminous evidence, it took something else.

"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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Lyakhov

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.10.017

brutusborn2• 3 years ago

What makes you so sure their demise is due to climate? I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong but this kind of arrogant certainty based on limited data is rarely justified.

trilbyglens2• 3 years ago

And with Russia as the target environment lol.

redeux2• 3 years ago

I have to think that if we can clone Wooly Mammoths back from extinction and we can clone monkeys[1] that we can, and probably have, clone humans.

1. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Healthy_cloned_monkeys_born_in_...

gremlinsinc• 3 years ago

we can certainly clone humans. not like in some movies where the clone is all magically grown up. it'd still start as an infant and you can speed that up.

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?

redeux2• 3 years ago

Nobody is suggesting that clones are "magically grown up." I'm not sure where that comment is coming from...

What utility does cloning any anime give you if you can't have a replica with the same age, skills, and experience?

goplayoutside• 3 years ago

Project page from the company doing the engineering:

* 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.

gslepak• 3 years ago

How is bringing back the Mammoth going to do any of that?

jbotz• 3 years ago

Read up on Allan Savory; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory

anon848736282• 3 years ago

African elephants destroy trees and thus maintain a more open savannah. They prevent the ecosystem from advancing to later stages of forest succession.

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...

barbariangrunge• 3 years ago

To restore the grasslands? Hate to break it to you, but the bison did that too. I know a few people who study or give talks those creatures and reintroducing those to habitats is maddeningly difficult. Nobody wants a herd of bison wandering into town, or on the highway, nobody will allow them to be wild near any settled area

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

oatmeal1• 3 years ago

Are grasslands that have permafrost under them really the grassland that has been taken over by agriculture? I would imagine the grassland mammoths can restore is different from grassland bison could restore. I'd also imagine the places cold enough for mammoths would also be places there aren't any people.

gizajob3• 3 years ago

It did make me think that elephants are very social matriarchal animals - the elephant that gives birth to the mammoth is going to want to keep it around, and the mammoth can’t really be separated and kept in some kind of isolation. But then they need to birth more mammoths, and even breed the mammoths (could be quicker) so I wonder how they’re going to manage a combined elephant-mammoth herd. Doesn’t make much sense to have a solitary mammoth wandering around on its own in Siberia, it’ll take a bunch of them. And then to convince them they’re not elephants.

ggm3• 3 years ago

Bison could probably do the job, or moose/elk.

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

NegativeLatency• 3 years ago

Might be helpful to have those big wide feet?

ggm3• 3 years ago

I don't think I understand their impact on the landscape. The methane risks in the melting steppes might be something which is affected by how large animals behave in the landscape, and sure their feet would play to that. Cattle and horses are notably destructive to landscape by their feet. Sheep and Goats I think its over grazing mostly, but all of them can cause massive erosion gullies, I think thats likely to be an issue anywhere.

selcuka• 3 years ago

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.

tmountain• 3 years ago

What about genetic diversity? Is there enough quality DNA to establish a hardy herd?

ggm3• 3 years ago

Ethically maintinaing a herd of host mother elephants, raising that many mammoth babies, the success rates for implantation, its not going to be a fast process.

"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)

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

They will need elephants as surrogate mothers.

justrealist• 3 years ago

Bison and Moose clearly can't graze on developed pine/fir trees which is why the subarctic has been reforesting for 10,000 years and there's basically no subarctic steppe/grassland [1] left (after the mammoths died).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_steppe

brap• 3 years ago

Suppose they manage to create a mammoth zygote, where is it going to grow? Can they just put it in an elephant’s womb? Will it grow just the same? Are wombs universal?

soligern3• 3 years ago

It’s literally in the article. In an African elephant.

dotnet002• 3 years ago

Wombs aren't entirely universal but Elephants and Mammoths are closely related enough that one's womb might work as a surrogate for the other.

technick• 3 years ago

They've been saying this since Jurassic Park came out in the mid 90's, still nothing has ever materialized.

I'll believe that when pigs fly...

BirAdam2• 3 years ago

https://media.tenor.com/images/9119ca5271780a7f2d3b9e3a8b784...

robwwilliams2• 3 years ago

Impressive genetics hubris. Given 200 years we might have the technology to do this. If this team wants to prove they can do this then why not start with two closely related rodent species as proof of principle? In my opinion—-and speaking as as a statistical geneticist who studies microevolutionary differences and change (variation with species)—-this is simply a PR stunt by a group that does not understand population genetics very well and takes Mendelian models of gene action much too seriously.

I actually hope I am totally wrong!

soligern3• 3 years ago

It’s honestly not that hard to get the gene set you’re looking for in a single cell. It’s may take tens of thousands of attempts for it to be exactly what they’re looking for but it’s possible with current technology.

robwwilliams2• 3 years ago

It is not just the gene set. That is what I meant by Mendelian thinking. Just this week in a paper in Nature and after 30 years of intensive sequencing we added 30 million basepairs to the human Y chromosome assembly. The genomes of mammoth and Asian elephant are not nearly of as high quality as the human genome.

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.

sublinear• 3 years ago

Absolutely looking forward to those steaks, ribs, burgers, etc.

smoyer• 3 years ago

If only your sig was fredflintstone!

molticrystal• 3 years ago

Maybe they can do the North American Camel that went extinct 12,000 years ago next. Lots of great candidates, both recent and prehistoric.

henjodottech• 3 years ago

The woolly mammoth’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match of the Asian elephant

If humans and mice share 85% DNA, how useful are these metrics?

arp242• 3 years ago

Let's say you have two 20k line Python programs: those 20k lines are all different.

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.

insaider• 3 years ago

Nice analogy!

HFguy• 3 years ago

Good thinking!!!

xwdv• 3 years ago

Incredible analogy, very air tight.

tetris11• 3 years ago

Similarly

``` 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 ```

CapitalistCartr• 3 years ago

Our DNA is shared more than 98 percent with chimpanzees and bonobos, our next of kin.

DiogenesKynikos• 3 years ago

Humans and mice are very similar to one another, so I think this is a useful metric.

gizajob3• 3 years ago

Yeah but the important metric is whether a human could gestate and birth a mouse or a mouse could do the same for a human - they couldn’t.

mkl• 3 years ago

African elephants and Indian elephants apparently share 95% (https://archive.ph/hElph), so it seems useful. Also makes it strange that they intend to use an African elephant as surrogate mother.

karmakurtisaani• 3 years ago

They are not even precise metrics. They are often made from "modified" DNA, where the parts though to be redundant are first discarded. It's more like "parts that we can compare and think are relevant match by x%".

Flatcircle• 3 years ago

I love the climate change angle to justify de-extincting the mammoth. That's a stretch.

spacecadet• 3 years ago

Yeah, cringe really. Wait for it to fail and they go extinct round 2 + it really fucks that ecosystem. This screams laking of robust externality thinking.

trilbyglens2• 3 years ago

Seems like it's all just window dressing on "because we can"

brutusborn2• 3 years ago

Since climate change is so hard to model it has basically become a synonym for ‘undesirable environmental event.’ This is why things like fires started by power lines are ‘caused by climate change’ and why any research that is related to the environment can be justified by ‘helping solve climate change.’

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.

lolinder2• 3 years ago

The eventual goal is to then repopulate parts of the Arctic with the new woolly mammoth and strengthen local plant life with the migration patterns and dietary habits of the beast.

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?

hackerlight• 3 years ago

Is 4000 years long enough for that to be a concern? Humans haven't changed that much in 4000 years, probably most other species haven't either. I suppose 4000 years could be long enough, because the climate has changed and evolution can happen quickly, but we'd need to actually analyze the ecosystem to come to that determination.

AussieWog93• 3 years ago

4000 years should be long enough for another species to come along and occupy whatever niche the mammoths were in.

lolinder2• 3 years ago

The whole premise of their argument is that the ecosystem is completely different than it once was. Humans are unchanged because we've been the primary changers, but the Arctic ecosystem would be unrecognizable to a mammoth:

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.

[0] https://colossal.com/mammoth/

midoridensha• 3 years ago

After they bring back the mammoth and repopulate the Arctic with it, they should bring back the Velociraptor.

Dban1• 3 years ago

Can we bring back the Dodo too

sillywalk• 3 years ago

I wonder what it tastes like, and also if a billionaire could make one to find out and tell us.

gizajob3• 3 years ago

Probably tastes like elephant

93po• 3 years ago

There are some people who have eaten previously frozen mammoth meat and the universal feedback is that it’s disgusting but I’m sure that’s more because it’s been frozen forever

imagetic• 3 years ago

How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction

https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-clone-a-mammoth-the-scie...

RamblingCTO• 3 years ago

I really like this idea, but what about population control? I'd hate to see bug game hunting as a paid sport as a solution. So we need sabertooth tigers as well? Hell no

thiht• 3 years ago

I remember reading about this when I was a kid, maybe close to 20 years ago.

This is one of these things that you keep hearing about but never comes to completion. Like human teeth regrowth, or graphene.

KevinMS• 3 years ago

What is with all this wooly mammoth bias, who will speak for the mastodon?

Scientists are working to bring the woolly mammoth back

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