Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Vast hairy beasts tramping the Arctic Tundra will help save the world.
Scientists Hope Mammoth ‘De-extinction’ Will Save Earth
Kashmira Gander
1 day ago
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Scientists fear that the absence of large mammals pressing down and scraping back thick layers of winter snow in the region prevents the cold from penetrating the soil. Combined with warmer summers, the Arctic permafrost is melting. As a result, the frozen soil, packed with leaves and other organic materials that haven’t decayed, will become exposed, releasing carbon into the atmosphere in the form of the greenhouse gasses carbon dioxide and methane.
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The scientists are keen not to impregnate an elephant in case something goes wrong. But one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the project has been creating sufficient blood vessels in artificial womb tissue to provide support for a growing embryo.
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Prof Church helped develop the most widely used technique, known as Crispr that has transformed genetic engineering since it was first demonstrated in 2012.
Derived from a defence system bacteria use to fend off viruses, it allows scientists to snip away parts of the genetic code and replace it with new DNA.
Prof Church, who spoke about Crispr at the meeting, said the mammoth project had two goals – securing an alternative future for the endangered Asian elephant and helping to combat global warming.
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The scientists plan to genetically edit out the tusks, to deter ivory poachers.
I can’t help thinking a walking mountain of fresh meat wandering the frozen Arctic might attract hunters for reasons other than their ivory.
I will never understand this Jurassic Park idiocy. The mammoth died out a VERY long time ago, over 4,000 years ago. They are related to elephants but they are NOT the same critters.
Elephants and mammoths diverged between five and three million years ago to form three genera in the family: Loxodonta, the African elephants; Elephas, the Asian elephant; and Mammuthus, which includes the several vanished species of mammoths.
This is ridiculous!!! I hope these people who are fiddling around with Mother Nature are using money they won in the lottery. If not, they should be ashamed of themselves. Why not clone Ramses II while your’e at it? Or Secretariat? Survival is a byproduct of an animal’s ability to adapt to a changing environment. Mammoths Are extinct, and no, they didn’t have a whole lot to do with scraping the tundra. It’s more likely they fertilized it all over the place.
There’s a REASON they’re gone. Let them go in peace.
What’s next? Pterodactyls and T. Rex?
hmm. How in Hell will they scrape away the surface if they have no tusks?
How will they survive if there’s not enough food for them to eat? If an elephant consumes as much as 600 pounds of fodder, including grasses, small trees and bushes, per day, where is the food going to come from that these critters are supposed to live on ? They are almost as large as modern elephants, require the same caloric content, as well as water (up to 80 gallons per day) and need a wide range to forage.
I hope sincerely that this idiocy fails and fails badly, for the sake of any prospective mammoths or mammoth elephant crosses. There is no reason to inflict this twaddle on them.
Oh, yeah, I almost left out that thing about how wealthy people will want a mammoth for themselves. Count on it.
The charlatans have this on auto pilot. They claim that a reduction of snow/ice in some Arctic places is endangering the planet but then also claim that allowing it to remain in other Arctic places is endangering the planet. Not only does global warming cause more and less snow/ice – we’re double doomed because it’s doing it in the wrong places!
Every time you think peak stupidity has been reached the eco-enthusiasts manage to surpass themselves with astonishing ease.
It’s almost like no one understands science fiction any more.
There’s a reason we call it the “Law” of Unintended Consequences.
hmm. How in Hell will they scrape away the surface if they have no tusks?
Cows don’t fart.
They may belch but only significantly when force fed an unsuitable diet. Namely, a diet high in cellulosic stalks and seed-heads (aka ‘fibre’)
Normally when out in the wild they would selectively harvest/eat only the leaves of the grass plants – the leaves being the sugar factories of plants.
The stalky indigestible parts would be trampled down into the soil (creating the organic matter they are so concerned about.
A layer of snow or ice is generally regarded by farmers, growers and horticulturists to have significant (soil) insulating properties.
Should a frost be predicted in a vineyard at a susceptible time, growers are actually advised to spray the plants with water to create a layer of ice on sensitive buds which actually prevents frost damage. (Enquiring minds want to know where the GHGE stands on this)
People fart.
That they find it either hilariously funny or regard it as normal is (just one more) milestone down the road predicted by Ehrlich.
Human farting represents the uncontrolled anaerobic decomposition of otherwise indigestible and unsuitable foodstuff.
Done by some very angry and desperately unpleasant unpleasant bacteria that would normally be found in sewers, septic tanks and wet/stinking compost heaps. An absolute bonfire of free-radical reactions.
And medical science wonders where and/all of the autoimmune disorders and cancers come from.
Simply incredible.
Methane in the atmosphere is akin to the VOCs produced by plants.
Why do they do that?
Possibly the VOCs and methane alike are ‘sacrificial lambs’ sent up by the plants to mop up ground-level ozone – the most biologically destructive stuff known to man or nature.
(and mammoths probably. bless them. such sweeties)
What exactly would be wrong with resurrecting the (millions of) buffalo……………
I liked this little tidbit at the end of the Newsweek Article
Giving the Asian Elephant a Venereal Disease at pre-birth will certainly have no ill effect on the species and won’t lead to their eventual demise due to disease passed through breeding
Bryan A May 3, 2018 at 9:55 am
I liked this little tidbit at the end of the Newsweek Article
As part of this research, the Professor Church’s lab also hopes to synthesize in vitro a strain of herpes that affects Asian elephants, with the possibility of creating a treatment or vaccine.
Giving the Asian Elephant a Venereal Disease at pre-birth will certainly have no ill effect on the species and won’t lead to their eventual demise due to disease passed through breeding
EEHV is not a venereal disease but it is a fatal disease among Asian elephants and Church’s group is attempting to develop a vaccine for it. Like the herpes virus that causes chickenpox it is spread via mucous aerosols.
Coming soon to your local restaurant, the Siberian Mammoth Burger., totally Mehane free.
Baby mammophant music http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1z4JfxFb6c
Okay we have reached the point now where the GDP of green stupid is large enough to be counted and reported alongside other nations.
Well, it’s pretty clear these same …scientists… have:
1) no clue of the vastness of the Arctic, or just how many mammoths and their stompy footprints would be required (Hint: enough to completely denude the region)
2) no clue what being thoroughly winter-scraped of insulation against -60F temps and the ground being “stomped down” does to vegetation. (Hint: instant desert.)
Methinks the publish-or-perish crowd have jumped the shark. Or in this case, have ridden the mammoth.
METHANE SCARE DEBUNKED
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/natural-methane-time-bomb-unlikely-wreak-climate-havoc
It is impossible for methane trapped beneath the permafrost to escape if permafrost melts because the microbes eat it up as soon as it starts to melt.
“The researchers believe that soil and marine bacteria that feed on frozen fossil methane as it melts may explain its limited release, by preventing the methane from ever reaching the atmosphere.”
There are other herbivores in the Arctic. One assumes that if there is now a surplus of food there due to the extinction of mammoths these other herbivore populations would have expanded to eat it. Reindeer and muskoxen are present in limited numbers.
Nobody in their right mind would think that mammoths will ever constitute large populations up there. The fodder doesn’t exist for that with a 2 month growing season. These pinheads are completely out of their minds.
The pin heads don’t even understand that the mammoths went extinct because the savanna they depended on turned to tundra. They could not survive on the food offered by tundra.
If that’s what killed them, how did they survive the other inter-glacials?
For most of their time on earth, woolly mammoths and other extinct megafauna relied on the currently almost extinct steppe-tundra biome, which existed all the way around the ice sheets.
During prior interglacials, the megafauna survived by eating a mix of pure steppe and tundra vegetation, which required migration. But during the last glacial termination and early Holocene, the megafauna suffered from human predation.
Those which went extinct were wiped out by people, not climate change, which the species had experienced before.
Woollies evolved at least 400 Ka, and possibly even 800 Ka, depending upon what you think are the key differences between steppe and woolly mammoths. So they survived at least three prior interglacials, including the long, hot Eemian, which preceded the Holocene.
John harmsworth May 3, 2018 at 11:29 am
There are other herbivores in the Arctic. One assumes that if there is now a surplus of food there due to the extinction of mammoths these other herbivore populations would have expanded to eat it. Reindeer and muskoxen are present in limited numbers.
It’s much more complicated than a one-to-one substitution, there are some interesting studies on this.
One example is the parks in Mozambique, the long lasting civil war there caused most of the large herbivores to be wiped out. As a result the savannah reverted to woodland because there were no elephants to browse the trees. Since the war the elephants are increasing and the woods are gradually diminishing but the grazing herbivores such as zebras are only making a slow comeback because their preferred habitat, grassland, still isn’t back to its former levels. Similar transformations are occurring in Yellowstone as a result of the return of the wolf, it takes decades to return to the former environments. Reintroduction of mammoths if it was possible would lead to more widespread changes than just those mentioned in the article.
If you think that pesky rabbits and deer munching on your garden flowers and vegetables are bad, just wait.
The polar bears must be behind all of this.
Beyond stupid. An adult elephant eats 200 – 600 pounds of vegetation each day. link
Plants grow very slowly in the arctic. The plants are rather small. There simply is not enough productivity to feed large elephant-like creatures. At least caribou can scrape lichens off rocks. link I have trouble imagining elephants doing that.
Yes. The environments which supported the megafauna were richer. The steppe-tundra existed south of the ice sheets.
The purported process wouldn’t even make a real mammoth. It would barely even be a hybrid, with just 44 mammoth genes out of the over 25,000 genes in Asian elephants.
Woolly mammoth and Asian elephant genomes differ by only ~1.4 million mutations, making an Asian elephant already 99.96% woolly mammoth on a whole genome basis. Of those mutations, 2020 change 1642 genes (~6.5% of all genes in the genome). So the project scientists’ hybrid, if successful, would be only ~2.7% more mammothy than an Asian elephant.
Clearly, the “climate change” angle is only to improve the chances of the scheme’s being funded.
By contrast, humans have an estimated 19,000 genes, but possibly fewer. Estimates keep dropping. The Asian elephant estimate might also drop with better sequencing and gene identification procedures.
A gene is a segment of the genome coding for a protein (usually). The smallest gene doesn’t code for a protein, but a small nucleic acid essential to prokaryote and eukaryote life. It is thus ancient, coding for Transfer RNA, at 76 base pairs long. The largest human gene is TTN, which codes for the giant (26,927 amino acids) protein titin, a “molecular spring” responsible for the passive elasticity of muscle. At 80,781 base pairs (three per amino acid), it’s over a thousand times longer than the tRNA gene.
This link doesn’t report the discovery, but sequencing of elephant genomes shows that the two African species, currently placed in the same genus Loxodonta, are actually as different as Asian elephants (genus Elephas) are from mammoths (Mammuthus), which are assigned to different genera.
https://www.broadinstitute.org/elephant/elephant-genome-project
So Family Elephantidae should have two or four genera, not three, ie either lumping mammoths and Asian elephants together or splitting Loxodonta.
Remarkably, Pleistocene North America enjoyed three genera in three families of Order Proboscidea: woolly and Columbian (possibly more than one species) mammoths from the elephant family, mastodons from Family Mammutidae and gomphotheres from Family Gomphotheriidae.
Not mammoths, but curly horses.
Cute video:
Shed mammoth hair would have been a great resource for ancient humans. Except maybe for the ectoparasites shed with the hair.
Very cool! I can’t believe I’ve never heard of curly horses.
uk(us), I’ve been really enjoying watching horse training videos by Warwick Schiller. They are absolutely fascinating. Perhaps you might enjoy this one (and Part II) as a lead in …
I watched them both Max, very interesting and thanks for the links.
Now on to Kentucky Derby…..mile and a quarter, it’s gonna come down to conditioning, that killer instinct and a little bit of luck.
Something tells me that a frozen wasteland is not going to provide enough food for such a mammoth animal.
Also, among the key traits distinguishing mammoths from the other two elephant genera are the “fingers” of their trunks and of course their teeth. These adaptations allowed their ancestors to survive on grasslands and the woollies themselves to eat steppe-tundra vegetation.
Don’t have a picture of mammoth “fingers”:
But there is this description:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/28/a-mammoth-mitten/
Well if they can’t find enough food, we’ll have to grow some for them. They will provide plenty of fertilizer.
The megafauna did probably help maintain the steppe-tundra.
Tourists would probably pay for the hay with which to feed the “mammoths”, which would really be variety of Asian elephant, given the small number of mammoth genes the scheme’s proponents aim to insert into Elephas DNA.
A shopper in my local food mart today was really getting a good laugh. Seems he met a mammoth shopper and along with the placement of her cart blocked the isles at every opportunity and made no attempt to accommodate anyone else. She would have tried to block a 2 lane highway if given the chance. Well the shopper met the mammoth in the bread/bakery dept and again, blockage! So as the shopper abandoned his cart to get a loaf of bread he hesitated for a few moments by the mammoth’s cart as he passed. Hastily retreating and watching with a big grin. Then another innocent shopper got trapped by the mammoth from the other direction. They both had confusion and disgust on their faces as they eyed one another. Funny that! What could have caused the smell in the bakery department?
Similar set up in the canned goods. Mammoth blockage again! Well, the smiling shopper abandoned his cart and proceeded to the blockage, hesitated a moment or so, and picked up a couple of cans of beans while passing. Hasty retreat and grinning observations. Did the beans do it or could it have been the spaghetti and/or deviled eggs?
Anyway, are mammoths getting the rap for passing methane or could it be a result of other environmental releases? Maybe a mammoth will be easier to find than the elephant in the room. Probably the true result will be no real mammoth and the elephant will remain elusive.
Tough to follow the logic.
The “perma”frost is melting because of CaGW so the solution is to geoengineer an extinct critter (minus it’s tucks) so it can scrape the snow away so the … Uh … “Climate Change” cold can keep the “perma”frost frozen?
Why not just have Elon Musk build a bunch of snowplow-equipped Teslas to scrape the snow away?
How often do polar bears or wolves eat Teslas?
(Of course, in “Land of the Midnight Sun”, he might have to addsome windmills to his design to keep them going….or some solar panels and really BIG batteries to keep them raking in the gree…er…plowing the snow.)
Bringing back a mammoth population is a WIN, a breeding population up North might help ensure the survival of human kind in those regions some day. Ayla loved the taste of mammoth meat. So did Jondalar, and with a full belly he could devote more time looking for Ayla’s nodule.
“Vast hairy beasts tramping the Arctic Tundra will help save the world.”
I wasn’t aware the Million Women’s Pussy March took that route.
Bugger you, I had a mouth full of coffee when I read that.
I’d like to see them bring back the Mammoth and place it in an appropriate environment free of environmentalists. Let’s add another to our inventory of large mammals. Yea, Mammoths!
It’s a shame that the woolies came so close to surviving the Holocene. The last members of the species and genus were apparently suffering genetic meltdown on their fairly small Arctic island refuge, but the oldest known human habitation on Wrangel agrees pretty well with the timing of the mammoth’s final extinction. They might however have died of natural causes shortly before the arrival of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrangel_Island#First_human_settlements_and_the_extinction_of_the_woolly_mammoth
Had they lasted longer, however, later human immigrants and visitors would most likely have wiped them out anyway.
“The scientists plan to genetically edit out the tusks,”
So the scientists believe these animals evolved to have tusks to please collectors? Or for some essential reason?
I believe that when the GOP left the intellectual fight against evolution, academics took over that ecological niche. Might be evolution at play here.
Columbian (misspelled in the article) mammoth tracks from Central Oregon, and graphics on the “de-extinction” scheme:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5386149/Ice-Age-mammoth-fossils-reveals-caring-mammoth-society.html