Scientists Are Reincarnating the Woolly Mammoth to Return in 4 Years

[Josquius]

It's cool and all but I wonder what the business model is here and how they're funding such expensive work.

[The Larch]

Colour me extremely skeptic on those experiments. I wonder if they're done privately because no ethics board at any public body would greenlight such a project.

[The Brain]

It's cool and all but I wonder what the business model is here and how they're funding such expensive work.

I assume that the important mission is developing and proving the manufacture of bespoke animals, and technologies associated with this that could conceivably have a number of possible uses. The "mammoth" stuff I guess is just a headline-grabbing way to get exposure and claim a "good" cause. The juice lies elsewhere.

FWIW I have a really hard time seeing for instance Sweden allowing the introduction of wild hairy elephants/mammoths. In addition to negative effects on reindeer herding, natives' rights, logging etc, given the amount of time they've been gone they're effectively an alien species now (even if they were actual bona fide mammoths) with associated environmental concerns. As a novelty in captivity they could possibly have a place, but "creating intelligent animals" just to "keep them locked up" isn't in sync with the times. With countries like Russia anything is possible of course, but it's Russia.

Edit for messerschmitts: obviously it may simply be a con to fleece investors.

[The Larch]

It's cool and all but I wonder what the business model is here and how they're funding such expensive work.

I assume that the important mission is developing and proving the manufacture of bespoke animals, and technologies associated with this that could conceivably have a number of possible uses. The "mammoth" stuff I guess is just a headline-grabbing way to get exposure and claim a "good" cause. The juice lies elsewhere.

FWIW I have a really hard time seeing for instance Sweden allowing the introduction of wild hairy elephants/mammoths. In addition to negative effects on reindeer herding, natives' rights, logging etc, given the amount of time they've been gone they're effectively an alien species now (even if they were actual bona fide mammoths) with associated environmental concerns. As a novelty in captivity they could possibly have a place, but "creating intelligent animals" just to "keep them locked up" isn't in sync with the times. With countries like Russia anything is possible of course, but it's Russia.

Edit for messerschmitts: obviously it may simply be a con to fleece investors.

Agree that it might all be a stunt to get free publicity. And yes, there's no way that such an animal could be reintroduced in the wild, as you say they've been extinct for so long that they have become alien species. Such a thing might be indeed kept in captivity in some kind of novelty way in a zoo or a bespoke location, but there's no way it could get reintroduced in the wild.

Every time this kind of genetic engineering experiments have been feasibly mentioned in the past has been in the context of either helping species on the brink of extinction to hold on or to recover those very recently extinct because of human action. To bring back an extinct animal from so long ago is Jurassic Park material.

[viper37]

At least with big animals they're easy to erase if reintroduction proves a horrible idea.

Not necessarily.  Siberia is BIG.

Alberta (and lots of other places) have problems with feral hogs.  Those fuckers can be huge, but we haven't been able to come close to eradicating them.

A hog is *slightly* smalller than an elephant though

Hogs also breed faster than elephants.

[viper37]

It's cool and all but I wonder what the business model is here and how they're funding such expensive work.

I assume that the important mission is developing and proving the manufacture of bespoke animals, and technologies associated with this that could conceivably have a number of possible uses. The "mammoth" stuff I guess is just a headline-grabbing way to get exposure and claim a "good" cause. The juice lies elsewhere.

Yes, it's just a proof of concept.  They'll go for other animals later on.  With ethics aside, they could save animals from near extinction and allow trophee hunting.  Like lion breeding farms.

[Valmy]

Yeah there are lots of animals close to extinction or recently extinct in the wild this could be used to save while their habitat and niche are sort of still intact.

[Josquius]

To be fair on mammoth and the environment-they've been gone a long time but it wasn't that long ago you had wild herds of smaller but still big animals.

I recall hearing not too long ago of research with a practical text  in South Africa (iirc) finding that soil really needed mega fauna or livestock stomping about on it to ensure its health for some reason.

No idea how this applies to different landscapes. The tundra isn't the savanna. But I would imagine there's a increasingly unfilled niche,as numbers of existing animals fall, for big animals.

[Josephus]

I must be getting old because I think this is a terrible idea.  What's the point anyway?

[Barrister]

There have been some suggestions that the extinction of mammoths may have helped end the ice age.  Let me see what I can find...

https://www.science.org/content/article/did-mammoth-extinction-warm-earth#:~:text=But%20researchers%20have%20found%20evidence,mammoths%20were%20nature's%20tree%20pruners.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-bringing-back-mammoths-stop-climate-change-180969072/

[Valmy]

I must be getting old because I think this is a terrible idea.  What's the point anyway?

The reasons I just stated 

[crazy canuck]

I must be getting old because I think this is a terrible idea.  What's the point anyway?

There may be other reasons for reaching that conclusion 

[jimmy olsen]

I'm not sure what I think about introducing a "cold-resistant elephant" that resembles a woolly mammoth into an ecosystem that has adapted over thousands of years in the absence of mammoths.

It takes millions of years for an ecosystem to recover from a megafaunal extinction. Ten thousand years is just a blip.

[crazy canuck]

What kind of recovery do you have in mind?

[The Larch]

Yeah, there's nothing to "recover" from. Nature doesn't have a default state it goes back to, it evolves and changes over time and animal and plants must adapt to it.