A Woolly Waste of Time? The Ethics of De-Extinction Programs
Image Credit: Charles Knight via Creative Commons
Woolly mammoths represent the bygone era of extinct animals. Although it has been almost 6000 years since the last titanic mammals walked the earth, Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences, claims it does not have to be the last time at all.
The idea presented is simple enough: take ancient DNA from woolly mammoths and splice them into embryos of their closest modern relatives (African or Indian Elephants). Finally, you insert the new hybrid embryo into live elephants and now the prehistoric pachyderm can walk amongst us again.
Sound too good to be true? Maybe because it is.
There is a lot left to be desired with Colossal Biosciences’ project to revive ancient species. Firstly, calling these slightly hairier elephants ‘woolly mammoths’ is a mistake: these will be simply chimeras of elephant and whatever ancient DNA that is recovered. To their credit, ‘colossal’ does reference that these are merely cold-resistant elephants, a singular time, before continuing to erroneously label them ‘mammoths.’
A further wrinkle is that ancient DNA is notoriously difficult to process, let alone sequence. In any case, these ‘mammoths’ will be little more than a shadow of the past. If you wanted to get ancient-adjacent analogues of modern animals, you might be better served by selective breeding, something already accomplished with Iron Age pigs in the Cotswolds . This case of ‘back-breeding’ is designed purely to create an aesthetic representation of what a historical species looked like. A glaring problem here is that pigs have centuries of history of selective breeding that allows for genetic manipulation by humans. Elephants do not.
The founder of this venture also claims that “[mammoths] will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth’s extinction.” Unfortunately, glacial tundra’s do not exist anymore. Climate change, the human exploitation of land and the extinction of local species, ensures that any existing ecosystem is undoubtedly not the same.
Regarding ecosystems, it is unwise to introduce a foreign species to a unique habitat. Mammoths were originally native to the Arctic Circle, but being transplanted into the modern Arctic will have devastating ecological effects. A species brought in abruptly has the potential to be a new age of cane toad-esque invasive species. Ecosystems are delicate balances and black boxes, which rely on animals, plants and fungi we may not even be aware of. Introducing a megafauna into one of the largest frontiers of protected space on earth underscores the callousness of de-extinction’s ecological implications.
De-extinction, conceptually, is only gaining traction in the media because of its focus on charismatic megafauna. It is easy to market bringing back the mammoth, the dodo, or the thylacine. However, it is not those species that are keystones to our environment. Our environment depends on the uglier side of nature, the insects, the molluscs, fungi, and plants and yet we do not see clamouring for de-extinction there. The draw that de-extinction programmes have on scientific funds is a danger to real conservation efforts that need to take place now, on animals whilst they are alive and extant.
If the goal is to protect environments and boost conservation efforts, de-extinction companies should invest in present efforts and concerns, rather than dredging up the past.
Extinction is a fact of nature, and it can be sad to think that such awe-inspiring creatures are gone for good. However, if we spend all our effort on the past, we may just miss the awes of the present.