Why isn’t animal cloning used to preserve endangered species?
In: Biology
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.
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