Return of the Genome
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Mammoths can have Mullets also - or maybe a Mohawk - nice big central strip of hair down the spine like some weird pachyderm brazilian wax tribute.
Woolly mammoth with rainbow pride fur.. How woke.
As a thought, we as a species tend to wipe out creatures we deem no use to us, anyone wanna guess what would happen to cows and sheep if the pushed vegan future came about?
The, distrusting, conspiracist in me think all those fields wasted on sheep and cows would make lovely housing estates, who needs farms and meat or diary when we can build houses for our new guests in the country?
As a thought, we as a species tend to wipe out creatures we deem no use to us, anyone wanna guess what would happen to cows and sheep if the pushed vegan future came about?
The, distrusting, conspiracist in me think all those fields wasted on sheep and cows would make lovely housing estates, who needs farms and meat or diary when we can build houses for our new guests in the country?
Wildlife has been going extinct for millions of years. If we re-introduce a species with our limited knowledge of any knock-on effects we could be doing more harm to biodiversity than good.
We spend far too much time and money trying to conserve individual species when what we should be doing is creating and maintaining as wide a breadth of habitat types (of sufficient size) - those species that are destined to survive will. Some species won't but they are probably on the margins of habitat comfort anyway (a good example is the barn owl
).
Just the reintroduction of a species needs a massive amount of thought, let alone creating an extinct one in a lab to release. A good case is the reintroduction of the Golden Eagle in Donegal , west Ireland. It has been a disaster. Since they were last here everything has changed and whilst Donegal looks perfect habitat it cannot sustain a golden eagle population and what's more there are no adjacent territories for any offspring. There was analysis of the indigestible material in the pellets. They found rats and young badger, hardly the traditional quarry. The project admitted it was an ill thought out failure. The sea eagle program has had more success that is because whilst the water bodies have changed somewhat the changes are not as dramatic as those on the land. XXXXXX
Went to a talk a couple of months ago by our local raptor group.Some species won't but they are probably on the margins of habitat comfort anyway (a good example is the barn owl
Barn owls are a success story in the West Midlands. They have increased by a factor of three in the last twenty years: mostly as a result of a huge awareness campaign aimed at farmers.
Human intervention can work to prevent (or at least delay) extinction but I sincerely doubt that we could bring a species back after extinction and can’t see any point other than an intriguing achievement - which is an end in itself.
Btw:
There were a range of different pachyderms, ancient variations on elephants as well as mammoths. Some of these were almost certainly hairless.
They found woolly mammoth remains in Oldham when I lived there. I think it would be good to reintroduce them there. It is the most boring place on planet. earth. I would also release a load of saber tooth tigers and a couple of dozen dodos. Btw is dodo both singular and plural? or is it dodoes? or Dodie even
xxxxxWe may never know unless we can de-extinct at least two of them.
I often see that we do things from the top down, rather from the bottom up. You cannot build an ecco system without the base of the pyramid being already in place.
For instance,
There is a butterfly that all but died out, think it was one of the blues, and nobody could figure out why. One young man sat out for months studying the last remaining few, and discovered that it relied on a symbiotic relationship with one particular variety of red ant, which was also dying out as they needed a very particular length of grass to survive, and modern farm practice had altered that detail by stopping grazing to rewild the area, causing the grass to grow too long...(or was it the other way round? I forget the exact details).....anyway, the height of the grass was critical for the ants survival, and the ants were critical for the butterflies survival. So just simply reintroducing the butterflies from elsewhere (top down) would have been pointless without the correct habitat, and ant species being conserved first. (Bottom up)
But of course human ego wants to focus on the macro project for fame and glory, rather than focusing on the micro projects that criticaly support everything above it.
I too want to be able to sleep in my hammock safely without a mammoth or t rex wandering through the campsite thank you very much!
For instance,
There is a butterfly that all but died out, think it was one of the blues, and nobody could figure out why. One young man sat out for months studying the last remaining few, and discovered that it relied on a symbiotic relationship with one particular variety of red ant, which was also dying out as they needed a very particular length of grass to survive, and modern farm practice had altered that detail by stopping grazing to rewild the area, causing the grass to grow too long...(or was it the other way round? I forget the exact details).....anyway, the height of the grass was critical for the ants survival, and the ants were critical for the butterflies survival. So just simply reintroducing the butterflies from elsewhere (top down) would have been pointless without the correct habitat, and ant species being conserved first. (Bottom up)
But of course human ego wants to focus on the macro project for fame and glory, rather than focusing on the micro projects that criticaly support everything above it.
I too want to be able to sleep in my hammock safely without a mammoth or t rex wandering through the campsite thank you very much!
Being the optimist that i am...
I'm not convinced they are extinct. They might be, sure. But so was the coelacanth … or believed to be. It was said it went extinct 70 million years ago, yet turned up a while back in a fishermans net in the pacific Ocean, off Indonesia, and has since been deemed alive an well.
I wont jump to conclusions regarding Thylacines.. Predators are dodgy buggers at the best of times. Being a marsupial probably makes no difference... but their old habitat is vast and sparsely populated, and there are recent videos which claim they are still kicking about the gaff. I'm not there, i don't know. But what i do know, is folk are quick to jump to conclusions and underestimate old mother nature and basic survival instincts.
I'm not convinced they are extinct. They might be, sure. But so was the coelacanth … or believed to be. It was said it went extinct 70 million years ago, yet turned up a while back in a fishermans net in the pacific Ocean, off Indonesia, and has since been deemed alive an well.
I wont jump to conclusions regarding Thylacines.. Predators are dodgy buggers at the best of times. Being a marsupial probably makes no difference... but their old habitat is vast and sparsely populated, and there are recent videos which claim they are still kicking about the gaff. I'm not there, i don't know. But what i do know, is folk are quick to jump to conclusions and underestimate old mother nature and basic survival instincts.
Need something to test eDNA on though don't you. If no ones looking... no ones finding. Would we have found T-Rex without a weird person who liked digging **** up? No. Would we have found Troy without a weird person who held a belief? No. So...
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We have dna from hylacene, dodo and passenger pigeon as references.
Certainly leopard and jaguar are Very evasive but we can find their dna.
If any reportedly extinct animal were still to exist they would leave the same traces of dna as the big cats - they eat, they ship and they die.
Even without dna folk looked for the kakapo because the indigenous folk has seen sign.
Certainly leopard and jaguar are Very evasive but we can find their dna.
If any reportedly extinct animal were still to exist they would leave the same traces of dna as the big cats - they eat, they ship and they die.
Even without dna folk looked for the kakapo because the indigenous folk has seen sign.
They roamed the entire Australasian continent. The name 'Tasmanian tiger' is just Europeans giving something a name where they were most commonly seen.
I'm not suggesting they are alive and well (like the coelacanth) But that their historical territory is way too big and sparsely populated for us to really make a definitive statement on the matter.
