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Hopefully we can still revive those along with mammoths.
by guard-of-terra 11y ago
Hopefully we can still revive those along with mammoths.
- alsetmusic 11y agoI have never been comfortable with the concept of reintroducing a species that we haven't directly observed. We can't predict the impact one may have on its environment or disruption to the food chain. Reintroducing a species which we are familiar with, say after over hunting by poachers, is more likely to produce the expected results without complications because we have prior knowledge of that species role in nature.
- sp332 11y agoWell we don't have to reintroduce them. We can just keep them in zoos or something. Or at least sterilize them at first. Chances are, they died off because they got out-competed anyway.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoBy whom? There's nothing comparable present now where they used to dwell.
- mirceal 11y agodon't think anyone would reintroduce a species, unless of course you would fully understand the impact it would have. there would also be interesting challenges around diversity and adapting to the environment. I could see bringing back a few specimens to life via cloning and whatnot - if only for being able to experience something from the past that we did not get to see.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoRemember, these are the creatures that lost. They were out-competed in their day. Also, their genes are likely still present today in some cousin species.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoThey lost mainly due to climate change. Ice ages, all that stuff.
- voidlogic 11y ago>They lost mainly due to... And in the case of the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and cave bear, likely humans.
- vallard 11y agoWhich may be another reason to bring them back: They probably taste really good.
- voidlogic 11y ago>They probably taste really good. Could be- Or they could have been a good investment for the ratio of effort to food gained. In the case of the cave bear it may have been a case of killing of creatures that could be predators when humans were not in a pack and competed for the same shelter sources.
- RankingMember 11y agoThere's something perverse about the idea of reanimating a species essentially for our own enjoyment (edification, whatever you want to call it) after it died out through natural processes.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoNatural processes can include earthquakes, volcanoes, viruses. Its often random. Plenty of reason to think these species have something to offer in the present day. I think of it like publishing an old book, or seeing an old movie. It is being a good steward of a legacy in a sense.
- cwp 11y agoAlso, there are a lot of species that went extinct because they encountered a predator they couldn't deal with - people. Is that a "natural process" just because it happened before recorded history?
- MrZongle2 11y ago"Natural processes can include earthquakes, volcanoes, viruses. " And asteroids. The dinosaurs got screwed because they hadn't yet developed a space program.
- dinonugs 11y agoPaging Dr. Malcom...
- 11y ago
- Mz 11y agoThis may not be realistic, without even considering the angle of "can we solve the challenges involved in recreating species from some DNA samples?" The earth has changed in ways that can make prior organisms simply unsuited to life on earth, similar to how fish are not suited to surviving out of water. Gill fish simply cannot breathe out of water, even aside from mobility issues. So, as one example, the earth has substantially less oxygen than it did millions of years ago. This means giant dragonflies cannot breathe in our current atmosphere. You would need to put them in a special chamber that recreates their niche, possibly without knowing what parameters are critical to their survival.
- Kutta 11y agoThe species for which revival is technologically plausible are those with well-preserved frozen specimens, mainly pleistocene (mega)fauna like mammoths and the lions presented here. They lived at most a few tens of thousands of years ago, which is geologically barely worth mentioning, and the atmospheric composition hasn't changed much since then, or not in ways relevant to animals.
- hugh4 11y agoThis was only ten thousand years ago, though. Anything that lived millions of years ago we're very unlikely to find enough intact genetic material to string a genome together anyway. You would of course need some kind of zoo, reintroducing a new apex predator into the wild would probably wind up bad for somebody.
- jessaustin 11y agoBad for somebody, but still fun! This is the sort of thing I could imagine a dictator of a 'stan or a drug lord doing...
- gnoway 11y agoMaybe because similar things have already happened. Columbia has a small problem with escaped hippos originally brought in by Pablo Escobar. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27905743 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27905743