Why isn’t animal cloning used to preserve endangered species?
In: Biology
To clone an animal, you need to get DNA from it, put that DNA into a viable egg, and put that egg into a healthy female’s uterus where it can gestate until born. It can have a success rate as high as 2% in species we understand super-well like sheep, and way way lower in less-studied and non-domesticated species.
At that point, you’re often better off just running a traditional breeding program.
Species are typically *not* endangered because they aren’t having babies enough (*critical side-eye at pandas*). They are endangered because the place they live is being destroyed, their source of food is being destroyed, people are hunting them too much, or increasing toxins in their environment or food.
*None* of those problems are solved by getting the animal to have more babies. Even if cloning were quick and easy – which, again, breeding programs outdo them a hundredfold – you’re just making more baby animals which will die quickly due to the *actual* problems that endanger animals.
It is something scientist are trying to do, just without much success.
When there was only one pyrenean ibex left alive they took some samples in order to clone the animal.
The last living pyrenean ibex died and the species became extinct.
A cloned ibex was born later and the species became un-extinct for a few minutes when the animal died and the species was extinct again.
It is the only species entry in Wikipedia that has a conservation status of “Extinct” followed in brackets by two different years separated by a comma.
It turns out cloning is hard, but progress is made.
More recently scientist have been able to help with the conservation efforts of such animals as the black-footed ferrets and Przewalski’s horses.
One big issue is that in order to help endangered species you can’t just clone some of the animals still around. This will not add to the genetic diversity.
In the case mentioned above they cloned new animals from tissue recovered from animals that had died decades ago and had no close living relatives.
This increases the genetic diversity.
You will need a mother for your clones to bear the child. This should ideally be of the same species as the animal you are cloning. Closely related animals might work, but not as well.
Getting an animal of an endangered species the regular way or implanting a clone will not change the number of the animals alive but it will change the genetic diversity.
Even if you solve for all the issues with cloning, you still have to solve for all of the natural aspects causing them to go extinct. Otherwise, they just end up endangered again or in a habitat that cannot sustain their population causing issues with other species. Pandas, for example, are weird. In captivity they basically won’t even bother trying to reproduce. In the wild they are only fertile like 3 days a year and will only look after one cub at a time. And then they require basically a perfect amount of natural habitat or they just get lazy and start inbreeding or not breeding at all. Part of the issues with them is in the wild they “can’t find” each other. so…..easy fix right. toss some clones out there. cool. but now it’s too easy for them to find each other and they are lazy so they just start breeding with clones of themselves and their gene diversity shrinks so you better hope your clone was a perfect specimen or else you’re just replicating genetic issues in the population and……..they go extinct.
We need an absolute minimum of 50 individuals to carefully craft a healthy gene pool. Cloning would just increase the number of required individuals because the clones would be genetically identical to the one they are cloned from.
It could be useful to reintroduce a species to an area its locally extinct, but if the species is healthy enough to be reintroduced, you likely have enough individuals to simply take a portion of the population to use for that purpose.
You need a minimum of 500 individuals to let the population breed randomly and not have a substantial effect to the health of the gene pool due to inbreeding. Cloning again just increases that minimum.
Because most animals need to live in the wild under the care of their mother before they’re ready to be on their own. They have to learn how to play, hunt, find/build shelter. You can’t raise an animal in a lab and then throw it into the wild. It would die
They ARE using cloning to save some species. Condors, pandas, koalas, and tasmanian devils are being cloned as we speak. Tasmanian devils are being brought back from extinction. They are also looking in to the possibility of cloning wooly mammoths…
Unless you have an animal past reproductive age that is precious genetically there is no benefit from cloning.
Cloning is like in vitro – you still need to implant the embryo and then the pregnancy goes as normal. It’s easier and cheaper to just do artificial insemination.
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