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Ever since I was a kid I’ve always been hyped about the idea of them bringing back the mammoth. Been hearing about it my whole life…
But I have to ask… Why are we trying to, exactly? I mean, the planet’s heating up. why are we trying to reintroduce a woolly mammoth? It’s one thing if they’re talking about using actual mammoth DNA and cloning it, but that article was talking about specifically just turning on some genes that cause fur and cold tolerance… What is the point of just making furry elephants at this point? Where are we sticking them, and why are we sticking them there? Is there some ecological niche that needs filling? Are we going to attempt to populate Antarctica (and hope it stays cold enough for that?) with hirsute pachyderms?
How about a different plan? As much as I have been excited woolly mammoths my entire life, let’s try something a little different. Let’s shrink the elephants we have, and introduce them into North America. Elephants the size of bison, roaming the continent. You can still make them cold tolerant, to handle winters, and give em some fur if you want. But the elephants we have are going extinct, and you’re worrying about bringing back something else. How about we save what we have? Let them roam and graze Europe and North America, replacing the Aurochs and the bison. God knows we’re not going to stop eating anything too cow like, so wild bison is basically right out. Let’s let the elephant fill these niches, and save the species. They’re too fucking smart to let die. Elephants got fucking religion, y’all. We cannot let them die.
We need to answer the age old question - what did wooly mammoths taste like?
I gather they were really popular back in the day…
Reintroducing mammoths in the arctic could potentially help reduce the climate change.
There is a scientist in Siberia who built the Pleistocene Park. An area where he reintroduced a lot of large herbivores and studied their impact. He’s saying that boreal forest have a very low biodiversity compared to mammoth steppes. The steppes have way more animals, are stocking way more carbon in the soil and prevent methane leaks by keeping the permafrost frozen due to the low albedo of the biome.
The problem is that with the mammoths are indispensable to maintain the steppes. They are the only animal big enough to clear up trees, without them the forest is taking over and all the ecosystem of the steppes disappear.
So (according to this scientist), resurrecting the mammoth could revive a whole ecosystem, with a very rich biodiversity and that could have a give impact on the climate.
So there is a good reason, then? I’ve googled it before, and the best answers I’ve gotten are basically “cause MAMMOTHS!”
If that’s the case and there’s a good reason, then hell yeah, do whatever we can to prevent climate collapse!
But also, give me small elephants, please? Especially if they can manage Chihuahua sized elephants. I would have so many! And I would make sure they always have a clear view of the moon goddess they worship
Don’t let me harsh your vibe here, but are you sure about the moon thing? https://www.iflscience.com/the-internet-appears-to-believe-elephants-worship-the-moon-58666
I’m down with chihuahua-sized elephants, though, don’t get me wrong here.
I mean, I figured it was more meme-y than accurate, but good to know. Still, they’re smart as fuck and mourn their dead, and seem to have rituals, sacred spaces, and generational knowledge. Shrink them suckers down and let me give a whole herd of petite pachyderms a patch of paradise, please
but the main ingredient remains the same: a mammoth.
Is this how we get tribbles?
THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SPENT EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS MAKING TRANSGENDER MICE!
This was wise. They had to create the woolly mice so that when they create the woolly mammoths, they can woolly control them.
I am skeptical of all articles with “scientists” in the title… but those mice are really cute. 😙
Why? How about focusing on preventing more extinctions instead of some Jurassic Park bullshit.
We already know how to prevent more extinctions. Better environmental laws, more green spaces, better conservation efforts, less suburban sprawl, etc. You know, things that will never happen.
We have to experiment with mice before achieving the ultimate goal of laser shooting sharks.
“We were like this close” 🤏
I like to imagine that every time they open the big test tube/canister thing, it’s a totally different animal, but woolly.
Can I be nit-picky here for a second?
If you’re genetically modifying an elephant for cold tolerance and fur growth, you’re not “bring a mammoth back from extinction”, you’re creating a furry elephant. It may look somewhat like a mammoth, but genetically it’s not a mammoth at all.
It’s like saying you can genetically modify a homo-sapien to have a pronounced brow ridge and a hairier back and say that you’ve brought the neandertal back from extinction. No you haven’t, you’ve just designed a human who looks different.
And the most annoying part is that this is incredibly fcking useless. Wooly mammoths went extinct for a reason. Large animals are becoming less and less evolutionary preferred. Wooly mammoths are adjusted for the cold while our globe is warming.
Can we just use our fcking resources for things that matter???
Nobody cares about wooly mammoths. This is a test of gene editing techniques that can eradicate genetic diseases.
Then call it what it is
You’re using the same logic my dad uses to rail against going to Mars. He says there is no worthwhile reason to go there when more pressing matters on earth are in abundance.
Just like you, he is missing the forest for the trees, angrily ignorant to the fact that the knowledge you gained from trying to achieve a seemingly worthless achievement is the actual value, not in the achievement itself.
The achievement is just a convenient goal to make the science more exciting to the general public so as to garner more financial support from both private and government sources. Each of the steps needed to gain that achievement may not have gained as much funding as they do now if they were presented separately from that final goal.
Dang I guess me and your father would rly vibe then because I feel the same about colonizing Mars
Me too. And mining the moon.
When your house is on fire you don’t start looking for package holidays to Pompeii, no matter how much you might learn. We have all the knowledge we need to avert the climate crisis, we just need action and resources dedicated to fixing it.
What do you want the geneticists to do? They are educated in their domain, you can’t just plop them into another field
The applications of their work is likely plenty in medicine and bioengineering
Drought resistant crops, heat resistant corals, and rot resistant bamboo, please.
I want them to stop pretending that resurrecting a cold adapted species into an ecosystem that is rapidly melting will do anything productive.
If they want to be helpful they can work out how to engineer humans that can survive 40 degree heat and breathe co2.
Maybe this is a step forward that direction? I mean I doubt poor prime will ever access it, even if that is what they’re doing.
No, fluffy mice is not a step in the direction of heat adapted humans.
If they want to be helpful they can work out how to engineer humans that can survive 40 degree heat and breathe co2.
That’s what they’re fucking doing by bringing back the mammoth…
They’ll run when they’re ready, but right now they’re learning to crawl. Or to put it differently, let them cook.
I was being sarcastic, I don’t want bio-engineered humans adapted for extreme heat, I want us to not let our planet get to that point in the first place.
You’ll find that we have a lot of people on this planet, we can multitask. We can research genetic engineering, and green energy, and medical technology, and recycling processes, as well as things that don’t advance those immediate goals, like microprocessors, meta materials, superconductors, astrophysics, geology, mathematics, etc.
When your house will be burning for the next few hundred years and you still have to live in it because even on fire it’s the best house around, maybe just get on with your life and do something productive? Perhaps some of us can move out eventually, but it would take a lot of research in a lot of different fields, probably even genetics…
Something productive like finding a fire extinguisher, or productive like recreating fluffy elephants into an ecosystem that no longer exists?
Something like learning to make perfect custom designed edits to genes, such abilities could easily save hundreds of millions when the next major plague or crop blight hits. We’ll definitely find ways to make hardier crops, that can survive harsher climates. Who knows, we could get so good at it that we could afford to just strengthen every species we can find with genes to help them survive the rapidly changing world, at least for long enough for us to turn things around. Maybe we could design lichens or mosses that could grow on Mars, adding oxygen to the atmosphere. Maybe we could learn to do even more impactful things that I can’t even think of right now (since I’m not even a biologist).
And maybe, just maybe, genetics isn’t even the only field that could turn out to be extraordinarily important to survival in the future. Maybe we should continue to pursue every field of science and engineering… Because fucking obviously we should.
So why mammoths? Why not? Bringing back the mammoth is just a bit of problem solving, it’s an exercise with a tangible goal.
We already do genetic modification for crops and disease research, bringing back mammoth lookalikes won’t help with that. There is no problem being solved here, the only end goal is chasing headlines to be able to say ‘we brought back mammoths’. It’s a pointless egotistical endeavour that helps no-one.
Not really, we humans killed most big land animals that we found as we expanded our territory, back when we were hunters. This happened in big “islands” like Australia and Madagascar, as well as all the small islands. There, large animals had lived in equilibrium for centuries, and their extinction matches some short time after humans arrived. An exception are the galapago islands, as they were discovered in the 19th century.
And to recreate the species they’d need hundreds of them from different genetic material. Which means they’ll likely create a single one that will eventually die and costed billions of dollars.
Besides the fact that the hunting hypothesis is that; a hypothesis, there’s a lot of other factors as to why it isn’t a good idea. Mainly, ohh idk… The fact that they have had no place in nature in over tens of thousands of years? Even if we managed to create an artificial habitat and role in an ecosystem for them, they would be very vulnerable due to megafauna’s increased minimum land requirements because of their size and in danger constantly due to climate change.
Can we just use our fcking resources for things that matter???
Yeah, bring back the passenger pigeon! We need more pigeons! Do something that’ll make a difference already!
Also, can we get some dodos up in here? Where all my dumb birds at?
Jokes on you, bringing back dodos is an objectively better idea 😎
Yeah, as I recall they’re actually really important to the ecology of Madagascar. A native species of tree simply doesn’t grow without them. And without those trees, well you can imagine that affects a lot of things.
I already have the hairy back, can I say I am half neanderthalensis? Better than homo sapiens seeing how things are going…
Well, the goal isn’t to just create woolly mammoth-lile creatures by copying characteristics. The goal is to recreate the genome from what genome data we have into a living creature.
It’s not like they are trying to create a sweded version, but take a creature that is already close and change the genes to match.
At least, that’s how I understood it based on the article.
That’s not nit picky.
And next you’ll say that genetically-modified ears aren’t enough to make catgirls real either 😩
Can we let this one go? Not for science, not for accuracy, but for the prospect of having catgirls in our lifetimes, at least?
Give me the genetherapy that makes me an anthropomorphic dog.
I wonder if the Lemmy liberals are going to call you a transphobic troll for this comment
Are the Lemmy liberals in the room with us right now
No, you’re right, I was being paranoid. Everyone on Lemmy accepts otherkin, xenogenders, and neopronouns.
And catboys! We can be equal opportunity here.
The 15ft tall 8,000 pound mouse was last seen rampaging in the downtown area. OK that’s what I wanted the article to say.
They do look extremely cute though.
This means they’re gonna make wooly elephants and try to make us call them woolly mammoths.
We spared no expense!
Oh my god I want one so bad
Created a fake album cover inspired by this!
Got the woolly m, just need a few more letters.
I’d like to buy a vowel. “U?”
Damnit!
