Northern white rhinoceros extinct3/13/2023 ![]() we’re at fault for extinction, we’re also on the hook for coming up with a way to try to undo that extinction,” says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist and conservation biologist at UC Santa Barbara, who’s also been critical of de-extinction projects. And that makes humans responsible for their survival. Northern white rhinos have been extinct in the wild since 2008, but only because they were poached for their horns. “It makes a lot more sense to me to work on something like this than it does something that’s been extinct 10,000 years, that might not even survive in a warming Arctic,” Bennett says. While the habitat of the woolly mammoth is widely different from what it was thousands of years ago - fragmented by roads and cities, for instance - the habitat of the northern white rhino still exists. ![]() Only two females remain: Najin and Fatu, who are both related to Sudan and live at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy under armed surveillance. But the northern white rhino project is fundamentally different from other projects like the Woolly Mammoth Revival, and that makes the money worth it, says Joseph Bennett, an assistant professor at Carleton University, who’s criticized the costs of de-extinction and is not involved in the northern white rhino project.įor starters, unlike the woolly mammoth, the northern white rhino is not extinct - yet. “Over the course of three years the total annual budget has exceeded $1 million,” Stacey Johnson, corporate director of conservation and research at San Diego Zoo Global, tells The Verge in an email. The San Diego Zoo, which is also involved in the project, says an estimate is impossible since the technology needed is still being developed. Photo: Jan Stejskalīreeding a herd of northern white rhinos is estimated to cost as much as $9 million, according to the Dvůr Králové Zoo, with much of the money coming from donations and zoo revenue. Najin and Fatu, the world’s only remaining norther white rhinos, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Others criticize the ethics of resurrecting species whose habitats might be gone and putting surrogate mothers at risk. Many argue that the money spent to bring back long-gone species should be devoted to preserve the ones that are still around. It has, however, kicked off a heated debate about whether de-extinction technology should even be used. A hybrid embryo would then be grown in an Asian elephant surrogate mother - or an artificial womb, Church says - to give birth to a new mammoth-elephant animal.ĭespite claims that the hybrid embryo could be created as soon as next year, the project is far from resurrecting herds of mammoths. It works like this: bits of mammoth DNA are edited into the genetic code of its living cousin, the Asian elephant. Today, projects like the Woolly Mammoth Revival led by Harvard’s George Church are trying to use biotechnology to resurrect the extinct species and repopulate the tundras and forests of Siberia and North America. “If we have the techniques or methods to assist them to survive, I think it is our responsibility to utilize them.”ĭe-extinction has been a sci-fi trope for decades - but now the science may have finally caught up to our imagination. “They are at the brink of extinction only due to human activity,” says Jan Stejskal, director of communication and international projects at the Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic, where Sudan lived until 2009. If it works, the project could bring back herds of northern whites that used to roam the grasslands of east and central Africa, where they were poached for their horns. The odds of success for the rhino are much higher: Unlike species that have been extinct for decades (or thousands of years!), northern white rhino DNA and sperm are preserved safely in different labs around the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |