[HN Gopher] Woolly Mammoth Revival
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Woolly Mammoth Revival
Author : undefined1
Score : 29 points
Date : 2021-03-03 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reviverestore.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (reviverestore.org)
| fishmaster wrote:
| Woolly Mammoth Revival would be a great band name.
| slibhb wrote:
| The page lists supposedly rational reasons for wanting to do this
| but I think it's really just a romantic idea with no rational
| justification.
|
| Introducing new species into ecosystems is always risky, whether
| or not they're extinct. No one knows what would happen if we
| start "resurrecting megafauna". No one can say if reintroducing
| Mammoths will have a positive, negative, or no affect at all on
| climate change. The idea that scientists can answer questions
| like that is wrong.
|
| I'm all for conservation but this isn't that. This is "because
| it's there".
| wavefunction wrote:
| "Rational" has a very loose definition so "because it's cool"
| is also a rational reason.
| aerovistae wrote:
| Well, I mean, going to the moon was another "because it's
| there." I don't see anything wrong with trying to do incredible
| things just because they're incredible. We learn a lot along
| the way.
| osacial wrote:
| The page also lists that they are coordinating projects and
| bring together specialists, so umm... it sounds a lot like Mars
| One.
| hinkley wrote:
| Not to mention, reintroducing a subarctic species while we're
| busy melting the permafrost is just _mean_.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| why not start with something known to be fit to current
| environment? like tasmanian tiger for example?
| saberdancer wrote:
| Mammoths can be found frozen. I expect it's easier to find
| valid DNA in frozen mammoths then in tasmanian tiger skeletons.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| I feel like I've been reading about plans to reintroduce woolly
| mammoths for several years now. This link doesn't mention much in
| way of timetables or specifics. Is this turning into nuclear
| fusion or are we really making progress on this? What are the
| odds I'll get to see a live woolly mammoth in my lifetime?
| jyounker wrote:
| One good reason is that existing species are in some danger of
| collapsing from the extinction of keystone species.
|
| A good example are joshua trees. As I understand it, giant
| sloths distributed joshua tree seeds. (i.e. they ate the huge
| seeds, wandered over the next hill, and crapped them out in a
| big pile of fertilizer). Without giant sloths, joshua trees
| can't migrated outside of their existing habitats. That's all
| well and good while the climate isn't changing dramatically,
| but we're not in that world any more. The current estimate is
| that unless some substitute animal can be found, joshua trees
| with be extinct within the next few hundred years.
|
| So restoring ground sloths would save an existing species from
| extinction.
| wiz21c wrote:
| So, every year we loose a big number of species. And now one
| wants to reintroduce a single new one ? Shouldn't it be better to
| deflect all the energy, money put into that project to actually
| protecting earth as it is ?
| pvaldes wrote:
| umbrella species are useful.
| dkarl wrote:
| I would agree with you if we were playing with a fixed pot of
| money, but I think this project could bring support from an
| entirely new audience. I think a lot of people have a hard time
| conceiving of environmental protection as something positive
| and exciting. They see it as an essentially negative
| aspiration, like someone who sees healthy eating as an
| essentially negative application of discipline, pointlessly
| denying yourself doughnuts, because the positive benefits are
| too doubtful or abstract for them.
|
| Reviving mammoths is dramatic, exciting, and overtly new and
| creative. It's like landing on the moon. I think it could
| excite people who groan at traditional environmental
| initiatives.
|
| I know it's a failure of vision to see environmental protection
| as an essentially negative aspiration, just like it's a failure
| of vision to see healthy eating as essentially negative. But a
| lot of people see it that way, and they aren't going to
| willingly put their money behind reducing CO2 emissions or
| protecting habitat for endangered voles. Maybe for them this
| can be a gateway drug to giving a shit.
| Geee wrote:
| The disappearing species are boring.
| colordrops wrote:
| This argument is so frustrating. It's commonly seen with space
| projects, like a space hotel. It assumed several things that
| are usually not true:
|
| * The project is using a non-negligible percentage of all
| resources available to the problem space
|
| * Everyone agrees on what the problems are
|
| * Everyone agrees on the priority ordering of problems that
| need to be tackled
|
| * There isn't greater waste or opportunity for resource
| allocation from other projects first (e.g. video game dev or
| plastic surgery research)
|
| * it's the responsibility of everyone to always be focused on
| working on the highest priority problem on some global list of
| problems.
|
| It's very flawed logic IMO.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Even putting aside the whataboutism here -- the limitation is
| not "enough money exists on earth" -- it's not actually true
| that keystone megafauna goes extinct every year.
| derryrover wrote:
| I think you are right on a moral level. But on a pragmatic
| level these genetic projects are perhaps promising also for
| conserving existing species. Conserving a species in the
| traditional way, by conserving it's ecosystem, is costly and
| often failed. Especially if the ecosystem in question is
| competing with farmland, cities or heavily impacted by global
| warming and pollution. Storing some DNA is cheap and will get
| cheaper. Doing tricks with this DNA will also get cheaper if we
| do it more often. I know it is unrealistic to think we can
| restore an entire ecosystem from a jar of DNA, but we can maybe
| repair a damaged ecosystem this way. We may also be able to
| keep small populations, normally impacted by inbreeding, more
| genetically diverse. This may be our chance to domesticate and
| protect what is left of the biodiversity on earth.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| Thought experiment: imagine that you told the ReviveRestore
| people that they're going to change tack and use all of their
| brains and funding to protect the earth as it is instead.
| They'd probably all quit, and the earth will still be only as
| protected as it is now.
| cletus wrote:
| The sad fact is that woolly mammoths are gone. I mean you might
| be able to extract DNA and gestate it in an elephant or whatever
| but it won't be a woolly mammoth, not a wild one anyway. Why?
| Because it won't know what to do.
|
| They've shown this when species are repopulated in an area. All
| the herd knowledge about where to migrate, where to find food,
| where to find water and so on is lost. It's akin to a total loss
| of culture.
|
| Just look at farmed salmon that escape into the wild. They don't
| know to swim upstream to spawn.
|
| Life just isn't a stateless function of DNA.
| patall wrote:
| Culture is not static. Yes, the clan rituals of all the mammoth
| families from 4,000 years ago are forgotten forever, but most,
| if not all, of it would have been lost by now anyways. Instead,
| new cultures develop and will develop if we release cloned
| mammoths in the arctic. It will take generations to return to a
| natural like state, but it could get there.
|
| As for salmon, yes, the farmed salmon does not remember the
| stream it spawned. Nevertheless, you can take the progeny of
| those salmon and relocate them to a river that has been
| renaturalized, like it is happening in many places in Europe.
| Sure, the salmon will not be the same, but once the bears
| recognize it as a food source again, they will play the same
| role in the ecosystem as their distant relatives once did.
| kypro wrote:
| To be honest I didn't even realise this was the goal. Surely
| the larger issue here is the lack of genetic variance?
| Although, I guess you could take a herd of elephants and splice
| some woolly mammoth DNA into their genome and get the genetic
| variance that way.
|
| To your question though, presumably they could slowly
| reintroduce them to the wild in a controlled way? If humans
| gave them everything they needed to begin with then gradually
| restricted their food supply, etc? Wouldn't they eventually
| learn how to be self-sufficient?
| SaintGhurka wrote:
| >Wouldn't they eventually learn how to be self-sufficient?
|
| Maybe, but do we even know for sure why they died out and
| wouldn't their problems be the same or worse now?
| [deleted]
| saberdancer wrote:
| With time they would rebuild that knowledge.
| hirundo wrote:
| Feral children are sometimes raised by a species like wolves,
| more different from us than mammoths are from elephants. Some
| of them can never acculturate with other humans, but they are
| generally viable creatures. They are still human. That's better
| than extinction.
| prewett wrote:
| I think this would be cool, but I can't see how reviving an cold-
| weather species in a warming climate is going to be an
| evolutionary success. Not to mention whatever other reasons they
| went extinct. I expect that this mammothy-elephant is going to
| essentially be a zoo piece, even if the "zoo" is a large part of
| the outdoors. Kind of like those game parks in the US that have
| African animals.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| But the all-important question remains: how soon until I can
| _eat_ a woolly mammoth?
| elwell wrote:
| > a project in northern Siberia called "Pleistocene Park," ...
| Zimov wants to add mammoths to the mix.
|
| Having just finished reading Jurassic Park: "Life breaks free.
| Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even
| dangerously. But life finds a way."
| Symmetry wrote:
| Hard to be scared of an animal we've already hunted to
| extinction once back when we were working with spears.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Practically speaking, is this the best time in history to revive
| a species that died out because of a warming client? This is like
| reinventing ice & inviting it to your pool party in the desert.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| First the tundra. Then the suburbs.
| hinkley wrote:
| Honey the mammoths are in the trash again. Did you lock the lid
| like I asked you?
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(page generated 2021-03-03 23:01 UTC)