I would think re-introducing important extinct keystone species would help to stabilise failing ecosystems, the passenger pigeon was a hugely important bird species, who knows what problems we see as unrelated to their disappearance are actually caused by it?
Also, Its not like this funding is being diverted from endangered animal protection and restoration funds, it's the pure novelty (and hubris) of the process of reviving an extinct species that creates funding from unrelated scientific sources.
By repairing broken ecosystems that started losing species within the past 200 or so years we may help existing endangered species and are actually directing new funding to environmental restoration, not taking from it.
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Cloning might create live woolly mammoth
Re: Cloning might create live woolly mammoth
by Ludi » Sat 15 Jan 2011, 13:43:06
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('anador', 'I') would think re-introducing important extinct keystone species would help to stabilise failing ecosystems
How would it help to reintroduce an animal into a habitat which will no longer support it? The habitat for the mammoth as well as the habitat for the passenger pigeon, carolina parakeet, etc IS GONE. There is nowhere for these so-called "keystone species" to live. So "reintroducing" them would be stupid and pointless.
If you want to restore habitat, why not restore one of the most important habitats of North America, the prairie. To do so you would have to reintroduce the bison and the Plains Indians. Oh, and of course wipe out the Grain Belt.
- Ludi
Re: Cloning might create live woolly mammoth
by Pretorian » Sat 15 Jan 2011, 13:47:19
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'h')ttp://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2010/august/woolly-mammoth-extinction-due-to-climate-change78775.html
"Woolly mammoths died out because climate change caused a massive decline in their grassland habitat, scientists reported last week.
Warming temperatures and the spread of forests after the last ice age 21,000 years ago, turned the mammoths’ grassland into less productive tundra-like habitat.
This reduced the food available to large mammals like the woolly mammoth, woolly rhino and cave lion and eventually led to their extinction, the team led by scientists at Durham University, and Lund University and Bristol University, says.
These changes coincided with an increase in the number and distribution of modern humans, Homo sapiens. A popular theory is that hunting and competition for land by humans caused the extinction of the mammoth. The team doesn’t rule out human influences but says that the changes in vegetation would have had the greatest effect.
‘We believe that the loss of food supplies from productive grasslands was the major contributing factor to the extinction of these mega-mammals,’ says Professor Brian Huntley, from the School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Durham University.
‘The change from productive grasslands across large areas of northern Eurasia, Alaska and Yukon to less productive tundra-like habitats had a huge effect on many species, particularly on the large herbivores like the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth. Mammoths and other mega-mammals found it increasingly difficult to find food.’"
But we refuse to accept this information because it calls into question the idea of "Man the Destroyer." Man, unlike any other animal, must be inherently evil and destructive.
"Woolly mammoths died out because climate change caused a massive decline in their grassland habitat, scientists reported last week.
Warming temperatures and the spread of forests after the last ice age 21,000 years ago, turned the mammoths’ grassland into less productive tundra-like habitat.
This reduced the food available to large mammals like the woolly mammoth, woolly rhino and cave lion and eventually led to their extinction, the team led by scientists at Durham University, and Lund University and Bristol University, says.
These changes coincided with an increase in the number and distribution of modern humans, Homo sapiens. A popular theory is that hunting and competition for land by humans caused the extinction of the mammoth. The team doesn’t rule out human influences but says that the changes in vegetation would have had the greatest effect.
‘We believe that the loss of food supplies from productive grasslands was the major contributing factor to the extinction of these mega-mammals,’ says Professor Brian Huntley, from the School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Durham University.
‘The change from productive grasslands across large areas of northern Eurasia, Alaska and Yukon to less productive tundra-like habitats had a huge effect on many species, particularly on the large herbivores like the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth. Mammoths and other mega-mammals found it increasingly difficult to find food.’"
But we refuse to accept this information because it calls into question the idea of "Man the Destroyer." Man, unlike any other animal, must be inherently evil and destructive.
Ludi, which part of "mammoths lived on (tundra-like) isolated Alaskan islands 5-7 000 years longer than on the continent" you didnt get?
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Re: Cloning might create live woolly mammoth
by anador » Sat 15 Jan 2011, 15:28:08
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('anador', 'I') would think re-introducing important extinct keystone species would help to stabilise failing ecosystems
How would it help to reintroduce an animal into a habitat which will no longer support it? The habitat for the mammoth as well as the habitat for the passenger pigeon, carolina parakeet, etc IS GONE. There is nowhere for these so-called "keystone species" to live. So "reintroducing" them would be stupid and pointless.
If you want to restore habitat, why not restore one of the most important habitats of North America, the prairie. To do so you would have to reintroduce the bison and the Plains Indians. Oh, and of course wipe out the Grain Belt.
In some cases, you are right, which is why they would have to choose which species to resurrect carefully.
But passenger pigeons are not a victim of habitat destruction, they were literally hunted to extinction. Many creatures that I have listed suffered a similar fate, prey to human overharvest not habitat collapse.
those species that could re-assume their niche would have, probably, a very positive affect across their range in many levels of the environment.
its like the nearly extinct american chestnuts and elms (well not technically, but for mature trees yes) re-introducing them throughout their range(with virus resistance) would not have a negative impact on the biome, quite the opposite.
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Hunted out, starved out by habitat destruction, or breakout from the loss of Indians to biological warfare? Why choose one when all three are probably co-conspirators? The market hunters certainly hunted enough of them while they lasted but at the same time the oak and chestnut forest that provided their food was being cut burned and blighted out of existence and any species that losses its primary predator will go through a boom and crash cycle. Any one by itself would probably reduced their numbers drastically but all three together at the right time and it was species gone.
