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