Mammoth cloning, anyone?

© 2011 Joshua Stark

Yahoo! News reports that Japanese researchers expect to clone a mammoth in the next five years. From what I know, the technology isn't far-fetched, and many mammoths are found with intact DNA... in fact, Northern Exposure had a great episode about this very thing.

Of course, the ethical question looms, right?

Well, not for me.  I'm all for seeing a live mammoth!  However, to humor folks who may feel uncomfortable at letting loose yet another charismatic megafauna on the Earth, and for those Goldblum fans out there, let's talk a little about the implications.

First, it is almost certain that mammoths, like many large mammals up to about 13,000 years ago, went extinct due to changing climatic conditions, and there is no real argument in favor of human hunting driving them out.  Since they were almost certainly killed off by non-human reasons, why should we want to bring back these extinct animals?

Enter the Pleistocene Rewilding, an idea bandied about by folks who consider the North American ecosystem to have been unbalanced by the extinction of a number of megafauna about 10,000-13,000 years ago.  As the argument goes, today's flora and fauna that had existed for millennia prior to the mass extinctions of this period now find themselves out of balance, as these large (sometimes huge) creatures moved so much biomass that their loss must have had an impact. 

A prime example is the plight of Joshua Trees in Southern California.  Up until thousands of years ago, Joshua Trees were propagated by a giant ground sloth.  Now, the only remaining Joshua Trees probably reflect the last, tiny range of the sloth during its demise.  This range's climate has changed dramatically during the last few thousand years, as a mountain range has sprung up West of it, blocking the rainfall and turning it into a much more arid habitat.  Without the animal that fed on its seeds then walking over ridges and valleys to other, potentially more hospitable climes (very likely in California), the Joshua Tree is in danger of extinction within its current realm. 

The Pleistocene Rewildling line of thinking argues that species that had been extirpated from particular regions, but who still exist, should be reintroduced to their former ranges.  Species who are extinct, however, but who are known to have had an impact on their habitats, should be replaced with similar species (see this on the American cheetah). 

But, what if species can be returned from extinction?  What impact might a herd of mammoths have on tundra habitat, on the size of wolves or bears - the numbers of bacteria and other scavengers, too - on the movement of nutrients throughout the system? 

That's the big problem as I see it.  We are focusing on the megafauna because, let's face it, they are very cool.  However, we don't know why they disappeared, and we don't know what else went with them, particular microbes, for example, that may have played a vital function in maintaining their "balance".  In fact, we don't even know what a balance means.  In any ecosystem movement, there are winners and losers (in the living sense); outside of our own impacts, who are we to pick these winners and losers?

These questions are vital before we can start to imagine a "healthy" ecosystem beyond managing our own impacts, and since our own impacts have been very large and often systems-wide, we have a lot of work to do in the present realm.  I hope the Pleistocene Rewildling efforts will, for the most part, remain shelved until we can control our own impacts, and get a better picture of the mass extinctions that took place thousands of years ago.

That said, I still want to see a mammoth.  I was an eight-year-old once.