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