The Sierra Nevada Red Fox; no longer a throwaway species
posted by gene
on Mon, 2010-09-06 13:43
Great news from the world of animals-that-humans-have-driven-to-near-extinctionology!
the sierra nevada red fox
Thought to have been driven to near extinction by the usual (hunting, poaching, habitat loss, et cetera), the Sierra Nevada Red Fox was last seen in 1926. That is, except for a small population of 20 that exists in a tiny area of Lassen Volcanic National Park, a population so pathetic that there was zero hope that the animal could ever be restored into a sustainable species.
But now, a second pathetic population of these foxes has been discovered in Sonora Pass, 150 miles to the south. The discovery was made possible by scientific video surveillance of nature. This is an element that seems common in these sorts of discoveries. It is amazing how far removed from nature we are, that we are trying to learn more about it by setting up surveillance cameras in natural habitats, and voyeuristicly watching what goes on, hoping to see something exciting.
The status of the Sierra Nevada Red Fox is aptly summed up by Ben Sacks, an wildlife genetics researcher at UC Davis:
"Having a second population really gives us reason to say that we've got enough of a foothold that it's not a throwaway species."
Well, that's certainly good news. No longer a throwaway species!
I wonder though. It's 2010. We know how to clone things, we seem to do it pretty regularly, sometimes seemingly just to announce that we have done it. Isn't it time to get all Jurassic Park on those species which we have driven to or almost driven to extinction? Why not, right?
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Re: The Sierra Nevada Red Fox; no longer a throwaway species
While I am as big a fan of cloning as anyone—and certainly don't harbor any pseudoscientific or religious opposition to it—I think it is worth considering that we really don't know what the crap we're doing yet, and modern biology is so steeped in this DNA-supremacy model, which I think is misrepresentative of the emergent compexity of cellular life, that I think catastrophic results are quite possible. That is, we could be unwittingly introducing subtle cellular abnormalities in nuclearly-cloned eukaryotic embryos that will not be evident for a generation or two or more, by which time they will have adversely affected the wild population in irreversible ways. And if you clone a captive population, they will lose the native "culture" of the wild animals. I would be in favor of cloning them and keeping them in some sort of preserves or farms or something, but I think we hold off for now on clone-doodling around with wild populations. There have, after all, been a number of unfortunate and bizarre deaths met by early cloned animals, and I strongly suspect that there are still a lot of issues to iron out there.
I actually have no idea what I'm talking about. But I think it is at least worth putting some thought into. Or something. For the wedge.
Re: The Sierra Nevada Red Fox; no longer a throwaway species
maybe we should just engineer a type of large rodent that can inseminate any other mammal and create half breeds, and unleash them into the wild
Re: The Sierra Nevada Red Fox; no longer a throwaway species
that seems like a reasonable and well-thought out compromise. i fully support it.