The American colossal genetic engineering firm Biosciences recently announced to hype and saucer that had “welcomed” the Huargo Wolf, a canine species that was exterminated about 10,000 years ago. However, the three animals he presented are actually modern gray wolves with some genetic modifications.
Regardless of whether you consider them terrible wolves or not, Colossal Bioscience made the interesting statement that he had lost ecological function through genetic engineering. This made me reflect on what ecological functions are there in current ecosystems as a result of the extinctions we have caused.
By ecological function, I mean the way in which all animals have some kind of influence on the ecosystems that inhabit. The honey bees and many other insects pollinate flowers with flowers, the beavers build dams that create ponds and alter the flow of the streams, the elephants knock down trees to help keep the savannas open, and the ants and termites move large amounts of soil and help decompose the leaf litter of the plants.
It is not clear to me what functions could have genetically modified wolves of colossal, which are different from the gray wolves, but it is hypothetically possible that different animals would hunt in different ways or places. With only three wolves, they are unlikely to have statistical power to convince new ecological effects. However, the idea that these wolves can perform ecological functions different from those of the gray wolves is more convincing than the statement that they have brought back to the Huargo Wolf.
A group of animals that have ecological functions that are oversized like them, are those that weigh more than half a ton. These animals have also been hard by humans, and many species became extinct in the last tens of thousands of years.
Every time our ancestors colonized new continents as they extended around the world from Africa, large animals became a greater pace than the little ones. Lizzy giant terrestrial, mammoths and elephants, bison and giant tires, even species of armadillos and mass camels were extinguished in the millennia after the arrival of humans to the Americas.
Australia lost all her large animals, including a giant wombat relative called Diprotodon, giant kangaroos with a short -face and a marsupial that looked like a huge tapir. Together with these huge herbivores, marsupial lions were also lost that evolved from a lineage of herbivores, terrestrial crocodiles, giant constrictor snakes and huge monitors. Similarly, Europe and Asia lost many large species when our ancestors settled in these lands.
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If we have to bring back extinct species, let’s focus on giant herbivores
Africa is the only continent that maintains a large number of large herbivores, such as rhinos, elephants, hippos, giraffes and buffalo. However, even in the continent where we evolved, losses occurred. A giant beast similar to a GNU has disappeared and at least one kind of elephant, extinctions both attributed by some scientists to our ancestors.
In Africa, giant herbivores who remain important ecological functions that have been lost in other parts of the world. The elephants knock down trees keeping the sheets open, while the hippos create grazing céspedes on land and add nutrients to the water through their manure, feeding the aquatic food chains.
All the giant herbivores trample the vegetation and banks of the rivers and are key actors in the nutrient cycle thanks to the large amounts of feces they produce. They can also help disperse seeds and generate a mixture of different habitats. These processes can determine the frequency with which an area is burned by forest fires, the type of ecosystem in an area, and can indirectly affect climatic patterns and climate.
The loss of these great animals, particularly in Australia, caused very significant changes in ecosystems, ranging from tropical forests to deserts. Fire and nutrient cycles changed with the extinction of giant herbivores, and the loss of all superdedors led to an increase in grazing and ramoneum pressure of smaller herbivores, including kangaroos, ualabíes and koalas. This made it harder to prevent forests from becoming semi -arid savannas and lands.
The absence of large native predators caused the remaining marsupials to lose their fear. When cats, dogs and foxes were introduced by humans, they decimated the populations of many marsupials, extinguishing some. The minor bilbies, desert bandicots and potoroos wide have disappeared forever, after having been easy for the carnivores introduced.
An impressive feat for Colossal Biosciences would be the reengineering of large animals to provide lost ecological functions. Extinguish great herbivores such as diprotodones and kangaroos with a short face, or even predators such as marsupial lions, would be a really impressive achievement, but I suspect that it will always be out of science.
Jurassic Park is fiction, as it is to recreate Australia’s fauna 60,000 years ago. Even if we could do this, it is not clear that extinct animals would prosper given how much Australia’s ecology has changed since its extinction.
Instead of trying to recreate the ecological function lost through the genetic touch -ups of living animals that are unlikely to be allowed to return to nature in the short term, we should adopt a different approach. Attention must focus on the maintenance and restoration of the ecological function using the existing species in the areas in which they live or in which they have lived. It is possible that the science of doing this is not as exciting as the genetic engineering of Colossal Biosciences, but it will be easier to deliver and will be more useful ecologically.
With information from The Conversation/Reuters.
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