Cloning Woolly Mammoths: It’s the Ecology, Stupid

Lyuba
Lyuba, a baby mammoth discovered in 2007 in Siberia. It is part of a special exhibit “Mammoths and Mastadons” at the Field Museum through September. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As an ecologist of ice age giants, I long ago came to terms with the fact that I will never look my study organisms in the eye.

I will never observe black-bear-sized beavers through binoculars in their natural habitats, build experimental exclosures to test the effects of mastodons on plants, or even observe a giant ground sloth in a zoo.

As a conservation paleoecologist, I study the natural experiments of the past—like climate change and extinction—to better understand the ecology of a warming, fragmented world. Admitedly, part of the appeal of the ice age past is the challenge of reconstructing long-disappeared landscapes from fragments like pollen, tiny fragments of charcoal, and bits of leaves preserved in lakes. In the absence of mammoths, for example, I rely instead on spores of fungi that once inhabited their dung.

De-extinction could change that. On Friday, a group of geneticists, conservationists, journalists, and others convened in Washington, D.C. to discuss resurrecting extinct species, including the woolly mammoth. De-extinction sounds like science fiction, but it’s rooted in very real conservation concerns. With the sequencing of the woolly mammoth genome complete and recent advancements in biotechnology, the question of whether to clone extinct species like mastodons, dodos, or the Shasta ground sloth is rapidly becoming more of a question of should, rather than how. The latter isn’t straightforward, and involves the integration of a number of cutting edge disciplines, but I’d like to focus on the former: should we clone woolly mammoths?

A growing problem I’ve had (and one which Brian Switek raises in a recent post at National Geographic) is that the de-extinction proposals are Big Ideas, but they they’re often shallow when it comes to ecology. Even the concept of “de-extinction” itself is misleading. Successfully cloning an animal is one thing; rescuing it from the black hole-like pull of extinction is another. Decades of conservation biology research has tried to determine the careful calculus of how many individuals and how much land are needed for a species to survive without major intervention, accounting for its needs for food, habitat, and other resources.

Mammoths have been extinct on continents for over ten thousand years (though dwarf versions survived into the time of the ancient Egyptians on isolated Arctic islands). Even so, the fossil record has yielded rich clues about ecology. All ethical considerations aside, from a conservation biology standpoint, what does it mean to be a mammoth?

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The Latest Bing News on:
Cloning Woolly Mammoths
  • 3D genome extracted from "freeze-dried" woolly mammoth
    on July 18, 2024 at 5:30 pm

    About 52,000 years ago, the skinned hide of a Siberian woolly mammoth was exposed to conditions so frigid that it spontaneously freeze-dried, locking its DNA fragments into place.

  • woolly mammoth
    on July 17, 2024 at 5:00 pm

    Russian scientists say they have a ‘high chance’ of cloning a woolly mammoth Woolly mammoth blood and tissue discovered in Siberia in 2013 will give scientists “a high chance” to clone the ...

  • 3D Genome Extracted From 'Freeze-dried' Woolly Mammoth
    on July 10, 2024 at 5:00 pm

    A Japanese team is looking at cloning woolly mammoths, while a group in the United States is aiming to create genetically "mammothized" elephants. Within the skin, "96 percent of genes are ...

  • The Last Stand of the Woolly Mammoths
    on June 26, 2024 at 5:01 pm

    By Carl Zimmer For millions of years, mammoths lumbered across Europe ... between populations so they can interbreed, for example. Cloning might provide another way to help species recovery.

  • Dallas Biotech Firm Takes 'Significant Step' Toward Recreating Woolly Mammoth from Asian Elephant Stem Cells
    on March 7, 2024 at 7:58 am

    Now that the stem cells have been identified, scientists will be able to use cloning techniques to manipulate ... much a resurrection of the exact woolly mammoth that went extinct 4,000 years ...

  • Of Mammoths and Men
    on December 27, 2022 at 1:15 am

    Ancient hunters killed woolly mammoths for their meat ... soft mammoth tissue in hopes of finding viable cells to clone. (See “Bringing Them Back to Life.”) A few years ago this local boss ...

  • Recipe for a Resurrection
    on April 21, 2020 at 11:09 am

    Talk of cloning surged again a few weeks later when ... Transforming this data into a woolly mammoth will be far trickier, though the existence of close living relatives, the African and Asian ...

  • Will the woolly mammoth be lumbering back?
    on January 22, 2011 at 3:56 pm

    It died out around 8,000 years ago…but in just five years the woolly mammoth could soon be walking the Earth again ... The revival requires a sample of intact DNA for cloning purposes and an elephant ...

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De-extinction
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