So, despite the end of my woolly mammoth project, I have been checking out all this de-extinction stuff.
As it happens, the Pleistocene Park dudes, father and son Sergei and Nikolai Zimov, aren't wedded to getting woollies. They'd take them, sure, but, in the meantime, they seem to be showing that by having big enough herbivores on the steppes - and getting rid of some trees - they can lower the ground temperature of the tundra. This is very cool (ha!). How it happens is that snow is like an insulating blanket but when the big hoofed beasts plod through the snow and scrape at it to get to the vegetation, they let cold air get to the ground. Plus,trees and shrubs are dark and absorb more heat than grass.
Problem is, there's no uncorrupted mammoth DNA. Even a perfect frozen specimen can't provide that. So scientists have to do millions of gene edits on the DNA of Asian elephants (from the forebears of whom mammoths split six million years ago) to approximate a woolly mammoth. Now, even if they can make Asian elephant DNA into DNA that codes for a mammoth body shape, with mammoth fat and mammoth fur and mammoth tusks, is that a mammoth or a modified Asian elephant? And does it matter? If it performs mammoth functions.
Another problem: we don't know what mammoth functions actually were. OK, we know what they ate pretty much and assume what they did to be somewhat akin to what elephants do (as ecosystem engineers), but it's rather sketchy. And we can't provide them with a family to teach them how to be a mammoth. People would have to do it.
Oh yes, and gestation. A Przewalski’s horse was born from a surrogate domestic horse. But no one wants to risk the lives of the few Asian elephants on a mammoth project when they have enough on their trunks making baby elephants. I don't know how many horses didn't make it to get this foal to be born.
What's more, to make a difference to the climate, we needs 80,000 of the things. It takes them say 8 years to reach sexual maturity and babies might be in the womb for maybe two years. So how do we get from zero mammoths to 80,000 before the permafrost has melted?
Britt Wray's book on all this is excellent. I hate to say it. She's smart, sexy and much younger than me. So I am bitterly jealous. But, it's true, the book's great.
She also introduced me to historian Dolly Jorgensen, whose work looks very interesting. And to the concept of 'last-chance' tourism - flying to visit that which is about to disappear due to anthropogenic climate change. It's all fascinating.
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