Biotech company Colossal Biosciences said it has brought back the dire wolf, an animal that went extinct 10,000 years ago, through its de-extinction process.
That’s exactly how it’s being presented. I’m not necessarily against the research, but there are only a few species we’ll be able to do this with. This isn’t a back door to undoing damage done. Plus, why do we do it with things that will have to live in captivity, as a wild release would reek havoc on an existing biome. Actually, this is probably true of anything, even seemingly docile ones.
Well to be fair we don’t know what the ecological effects of them would be. They could well be positive. This is a species that many of our living species today coexisted with for millions of years before they went extinct in the recent past. It’s possible (I think likely) that today’s ecosystems are meaningfully impaired by their absence in ways we can’t recognize because we have never studied what the complete ecosystem would look like.
In my mind it would be worthwhile to create a small preserve and study what those interactions look like. We thought gray wolves were harmful to nature for hundreds of years until we actually did the science to find out we were wrong.
The biological research will certainly be interesting. I wonder about the social aspects of these animals. Dogs are intensely social creatures. Are these direwolves going to behave like the originals? Without being raised by the originals, almost certainly not.
That’s exactly how it’s being presented. I’m not necessarily against the research, but there are only a few species we’ll be able to do this with. This isn’t a back door to undoing damage done. Plus, why do we do it with things that will have to live in captivity, as a wild release would reek havoc on an existing biome. Actually, this is probably true of anything, even seemingly docile ones.
Well to be fair we don’t know what the ecological effects of them would be. They could well be positive. This is a species that many of our living species today coexisted with for millions of years before they went extinct in the recent past. It’s possible (I think likely) that today’s ecosystems are meaningfully impaired by their absence in ways we can’t recognize because we have never studied what the complete ecosystem would look like.
In my mind it would be worthwhile to create a small preserve and study what those interactions look like. We thought gray wolves were harmful to nature for hundreds of years until we actually did the science to find out we were wrong.
The biological research will certainly be interesting. I wonder about the social aspects of these animals. Dogs are intensely social creatures. Are these direwolves going to behave like the originals? Without being raised by the originals, almost certainly not.