Can we bring the Dodo back?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetics, species restoration, rewilding

So your children or grandchildren visit Yellowstone in the year 2040. A year or two previously another step in the "rewilding" of the Park was taken. Information on the "Guide to Yellowstone" app has a prominent section on "Safety in the Park". The newest arrivals, ten healthy Smilodon (saber-toothed cats), have begun taking over territory from one of the wolf packs. Special safety precautions are required. Nobody is permitted to drive their own vehicle in the area, but must be squired around in special Safari vehicles with added armoring of the doors and top, and extra-thick windows of Lexan. Nobody is permitted to leave the vehicles for any reason. So far, it is still OK to be outside in the Old Faithful Geyser area and some hot spring areas. So far…

Saber-toothed cats. How cute. They once roamed widely in North America, and were a principal predator of the over-sized elk of the time, those too big for a wolf pack to reliably prey upon. A male Smilodon would weight more than twice as much as a cougar (AKA puma). Its 5- to 6-inch (12-15 cm) fangs made it the top predator of the Pleistocene. In a head-to-head encounter, a lion would stand little chance.

At the moment, nobody is proposing a re-creation of this cat. However, as we find in The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals, by Torill Kornfeldt (translated by Fiona Graham), there are serious efforts afoot to restore the Woolly Mammoth, the Passenger Pigeon, the Aurochs (the ancestral bovine), and the Northern White Rhino (very recently extinct). Other researchers are experimenting with chicken DNA, attempting to "bring out the inner dinosaur" in them.

Of course, chickens are dinosaurs, don't-you-know, but we like "real" dinos, with long snouts, teeth, and long tails. How about a flock of chicken-sized toothy dinos to chase down the moths and mice in your back yard? Would you want one for a pet? Considering how impossible it is to house-break a chicken, I don't relish the thought of cleaning up dino poop all over the house.

Perhaps half the book's chapters return again and again to Pleistocene Park in Siberia, where Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita are working to restore large herbivores to the steppe landscape. The residents of a large enclosed area there include musk oxen and a bison. A herd of mammoths to accompany a much larger number of these grazers, in a much larger area (fenceless?) would complete the picture, because elephants and their kin do something smaller herbivores can't: they knock down trees, which opens up the landscape for the grasses to grow. The activities of all these animals together produce a much richer landscape for animals of all kinds. The Park enclosure is a much more various and interesting habitat than the surrounding area. To knock down trees, the Limovs employ a Soviet-era troop carrier. They have to be their own "virtual mammoths" for the time being.

Let's suppose George Church and his colleagues produce a furry baby pachyderm some day. Would it be a mammoth? At first, only a little bit. Not having a good understanding of the full sequence of mammoth DNA, the workers are gathering one trait after another, to see if they can be spliced into the genome of Asian elephants. One result could be an elephant that is more cold-resistant, increasing their "natural" range (the elephants in places like the Oklahoma City Zoo, or the National Zoo in Washington, DC, can't spend more than a little time outside in the winter, and require hours and hours indoors to warm up afterwards).

Making one mammoth look-alike doesn't produce a mammoth act-alike, because that requires a herd. The herd somehow has to regain tribal knowledge that was lost thousand of years ago when the last mammoths died. It has proven arduous and very costly to properly socialize zoo-born Condors. Nobody is sure they really know all that a Condor must when they are returned to the California mountains. Some live, some don't. How do you socialize a mammoth? Taking a few hundred of them to Siberia for the Limovs to oversee would be by far the easiest part of the matter!

I was quite amused to read of one fellow who wants to bring back the Passenger Pigeon. Their legendary flocks, of millions of birds, would certainly be a sight to see. So would the foot-deep guano they'd leave behind after they ate their way through a chunk of landscape...or a suburb. In the West and Midwest, and to a lesser extent out here in DelMarVa, I've seen flocks of starlings that number in the thousands and tens of thousands. It is enjoyable to watch a swooping cloud of them swirl through the sky and suddenly drop onto a cluster of trees, and then burst into the sky again. In suburban neighborhoods, they are a pest, such that some neighborhood associations employ retired folks to use special guns that shoot whistling bottle-rocket-like projectiles into the trees and drive them off (to a different neighborhood). Now, multiply that by 100. Passenger pigeons were 3-6 times the size (weight) of starlings.

By the way, to reduce starling populations, make it legal to kill and eat them. They'd be a lot easier to wipe out than the passenger pigeons were. They are an invasive bird here; European natives. But it takes a lot of them to make a meal; they weigh about 2.5 ounces each. "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", singing or not, is a good indication of their size.

Scientists are very divided about restoring extinct species, and about rewilding, a separate topic. You can restore a landscape's wildness by simply moving all the people out, and perhaps trucking certain animals in. Bringing wolves back to Yellowstone has made great changes in the way the elk and other grazers behave, and in the vegetation of the landscape. If a cold-resistant elephant is produced, woolly or not, is it a good idea to release a bunch of them in central parts of the USA? We would also need to import a bunch of Thai and Indian elephant trainers to teach the people who live there how to live alongside them! Lack of success in that area would be marked by the critters being poached back out of existence.

Maybe Siberia is big enough, and remote enough, for a true Pleistocene Park, the size of Pennsylvania or more. There's hardly anywhere else on Earth that mammoths could be re-introduced in any meaningful way. That's not the author's conclusion; she doesn't draw one. It is my conclusion.