https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/09/world/woolly-mammoth-elephant-stem-cells-scn/index.html
Another article about bringing back extinct species. The claim is that
they can help restore the arctic habitat, but that is nuts. One of the
reasons that the megafauna species went extinct was due to the fact that
their habitat was greatly reduced in a cycle where the habitat that they
liked was around for a hundred thousand years, but they had to survive
20,000 to 30,000 year periods when their habitat was greatly reduced.
My guess is that the long cycles did in the megafauna because they
needed a lot of territory to produce viable populations, and after
adapting to 100,000 years of expanded habitat they were restricted to
pockets of alpine and arctic habitat that likely could not sustain
viable population numbers for the largest herbivores. The last warm
interval it got warmer than it is now, and more ice melted. There was
less arctic habitat for mammoths and wolly rhinos. The DNA we have
recovered indicates that they had severe population crashes. The last
paper that I saw indicated that the rhino population genetics did not
recover and still looked like a population bottleneck even though
indications were that the population size had recovered very quickly
once things cooled down again, but the genetic variation didn't seem to recover, and then they went extinct when things started to warm up
again. The Wrangle Island Mammoth were not hunted to extinction.
Inbreeding depression seemed to have killed them off.
Whatever they brought back today would just ruin the existing habitat
for the species that have made it so far. They need to think about
bringing them back when New York is covered by a mile of ice again.
Ron Okimoto
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