Dire situation

It's estimated that of the five billion species of organisms that have ever existed on Earth, something like 99.99% of them are extinct.  This is with allowances for the fact that -- as I pointed out in a post a couple of years ago -- the word species is one of the mushiest terms in all of science, one of those words that you think you can define rigorously until you realize that every definition you come up with has dozens of exceptions or qualifications.

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that extinction has been the fate of virtually all of the twigs on the Great Tree of Life, from charismatic megafauna like Apatosaurus and the saber-toothed cat all the way down to single-celled organisms that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago and left no fossil record whatsoever.

Some of the more recent extinctions, though, always strike nature-loving types like myself as a tragedy.  The Dodo usually comes up, and the Thylacine (or "Tasmanian wolf," although it wasn't a wolf and wasn't limited to Tasmania), and the maybe-it-still-exists, maybe-it-doesn't Ivory-billed Woodpecker.  The Passenger Pigeon, which before 1850 was the most abundant bird in eastern North America, comprising flocks of tens of thousands of individuals, was hunted to extinction in only fifty years -- the last wild Passenger Pigeon was shot in Ohio in 1900.

Wouldn't it be cool, many of us have thought, to bring back some of these lost organisms?  The Jurassic Park scenario is a pipe dream; amber notwithstanding, no intact DNA has ever been found from that long ago.  But what about more recently-extinct species?

Well, no need to wonder any more.  It's been done.

A company called Colossal Biosciences, run by Ben Lamm and George Church, claim to have produced three Dire Wolf pups (Aenocyon dirus) using DNA extracted from a tooth and a skull from Idaho and Ohio, respectively -- genetically altering the fertilized eggs of a gray wolf, and gestating the embryos in ordinary female dogs.  Here's one of the results:

[Image credit: Colossal Biosciences]

You're looking at a photograph of an animal that hasn't lived for ten thousand years.

My initial "good lord this is cool" reaction very quickly faded, though, but not because of some sort of "We're playing God!" pearl-clutching.  Lamm, who apparently has huge ambitions and an ego to match, sees no problem with any of it, and has plans to bring back the Dodo and the Woolly Mammoth, and others as well.  All, of course, big flashy animals, because that's what attracts investors; no one is going to put millions of dollars into bringing back the Ouachita pebblesnail.

But even that isn't the actual problem, here.  Lamm himself gave a glancing touch on the real issue in his interview with The New Yorker (linked above), when someone inevitably brought up Jurassic Park.  "That was an exaggerated zoo," Lamm said.  "This is letting the animals live in their natural habitats."

No.  No, it's not.

Because these species' natural habitats don't exist anymore.

Even the Dodo, which went extinct in 1662, couldn't be reintroduced to Mauritius Island today; the feral cats, rats, dogs, and pigs that helped drive it to extinction in the first place still live in abundance on the island.  What would the de-extinction team do?  Create a fenced, guarded reserve for it?

How is that not an "exaggerated zoo?"

And the Dire Wolf is an even more extreme example.  It originally lived throughout much of the continental United States and down into mountainous regions of Central America.  Adults could weigh up to seventy kilograms, so they could take down good-sized prey.  If you could create a breeding population of Dire Wolves, where would you put them that they wouldn't come into contact with livestock, pets... and humans?

The truth is sad but inevitable; the world the Dire Wolf lived in is gone forever.  Whether what we have now is better or worse is a value judgment I'm not equipped to make.  What I do know is that recreating these animals only to have them lead restricted lives in reserves for rich people to come gawk at is morally indefensible.  Ultimately, they can never live in the wild again; so a fenced-in reserve -- or the only other option, to let them go extinct a second time.

As huge as the coolness factor is, we shouldn't be doing this.  How about putting our time, money, and effort into not further fucking up what we still have?  There are plenty of wildlife refuges worldwide that could benefit enormously from the money being sunk into this project.  Or, maybe, working toward fighting Donald Trump's "cut down all the trees and strip mine the world" approach to the environment.

So after the first flush of "Wow," all Lamm and Church's accomplishment did was leave me feeling a little sick.  There seems to be no end to human hubris, and it's sad that these beautiful animals have to be its showpiece.

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The Lazarus flower

The way things are, sometimes it's nice to find a bit of good news to focus on.  Today's good news comes to us by way of my dear writer friend Vivienne Tuffnell, whose books are brilliant and whose lovely blog Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking should be on your "subscribe" list.

The article Vivienne posted was about an amazing accomplishment -- the "de-extinction" of a plant, the York groundsel (Senecio eboracensis).

[Photograph credit: Andrew Shaw/The Rare British Plants Nursery]

The plant has an interesting history.  It's an example of a curious phenomenon where a new species has resulted from hybridization -- in this case, between the exotic Sicilian ragwort (Senecio squalidus) and the native common groundsel (Senecio vulgaris).  Some time in the last three hundred years -- when Sicilian ragwort was unintentionally introduced to England -- the two cross-pollinated.  Such hybrids are usually infertile because of having sets of non-homologous (unpaired) chromosomes, but the hybrid then backcrossed to S. vulgaris, resulting in an allopolyploid, a plant that had a combination of chromosomes from two different parent species but was self-fertile.  It was also genetically distinct enough from both parent species that it couldn't backcross again, and thus was reproductively isolated -- i.e., a new species.

(Interestingly, another example of allopolyploidy is wheat, a hybrid of two grass species that have actually been identified in the wild.)

The problem was, the new species was only found in the city of York, and an extensive cleanup campaign in 1991 involved the overzealous application of weedkiller.  The only colonies of York groundsel known were destroyed.  Researchers had three small pots of the plant on a windowsill in the University of York, but the plant is an annual or short-lived perennial, and they didn't last long.  Fortunately, before dying, they produced a pinch of tiny seeds -- which were sent to the Millennium Seed Bank at the fabulous Kew Gardens.

Andrew Shaw, of The Rare British Plants Nursery, wanted to see if the York groundsel could be brought back.  There was a small amount of seeds in private ownership, but those germinated poorly.  So he approached Kew to see if the remaining seeds might be used to try to save the species from extinction.

It worked.  Of the hundred seeds planted by Shaw, all but two of them germinated.  Over the next two years, Shaw oversaw the production of over a thousand seedlings, which were planted out in specially-chosen plots of land in the city.  The reintroduced plants are now flowering in the wild for the first time in over thirty years.

"It’s a smiley, happy-looking yellow daisy and it’s a species that we’ve got international responsibility for," said Alex Prendergast, senior vascular plant specialist at Natural England, who worked on the project.  "It only lives in York, and it only ever lived in York.  It’s a good tool to talk to people about the importance of urban biodiversity and I hope it will capture people’s imagination.  It’s also got an important value as a pollinator and nectar plant in the area because it flowers almost every month of the year."

So there's your cheerful news of the day.  While humans do their fair share of damage, it's nice to know that sometimes, people who care will actually work toward fixing something.  In this case, bringing back a rare plant from the brink of extinction -- and introducing a bit of color into the landscape of a city.

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