Why don't people clone endangered species?

Question

We could clone pandas, tigers, but why don't we do it?

Answer 1

i thought a clone couldnt reproduce?

thus a clone wouldnt be much use in helping the population of the species.

Answer 2

It has been done for a rare New Zealand Cattle breed - and there maybe other examples - I don't know.

There are many problems with it - rather a last ditch solution.

Here is an article about the cattle

http://www.biotechnews.com.au/index.php/...

Answer 3

Well first of all its illegal mostly. Secondly clones are not all they're cracked up to be, first of all life spans are generally shorter than the natural versions of the animals. Also cloning causes a greatly reduced gene pool, thus if any disease were to break out in one of the animals, no animal that had been cloned from it would be immune so it would spread like wild fire, (this also happens when you interbread animals).

So cloning would probably do more harm that good, that's probably why its illegal.

Hope this helped.

Answer 4

Why don't people leave things alone - it's called EVOLUTION !

Where would we all be if some idiot way back had started cloning dinosaurs instead of letting nature take it's course ! ! !

Answer 5

We don't need cloned animals to save most endangered species. What  we need is to stop habitat destruction by humans. They are not endangered because they can't breed, but because they no longer have a place to live.

Answer 6

Cloned animals typically don't live as long as their naturally produced relatives, and  they also currently often have conditions and side-issues as the cloning technique is still not perfected.

The problem with cloning is that if there is genetic defect in their DNA, all the replicated DNA will also have the same defect, which, the new cloned animal will have the same problem.  Until they can replicate DNA without defects, it isn't really viable.  Then you have the ethics issues of playing 'god' with things...

Answer 7

Cloning is a very difficult process. It kills lots more animals than it creats. This isn't such a big problem when you're dealing with a common animal like a sheep or domestic pet, but pandas and tigers are rare.

Cloning of rare animals like pandas and tigers also ignores the reason for their rarity, which is destruction of habitat. What we need is not more ridiculous, expensive cloning projects, but less intrusion and fewer humans cluttering the place up.

Answer 8

There's no point, you have to change the circumstances that made the species endangered or the replacements are still endangered.

Change the circumstances and they will naturally breed and increase numbers.

Answer 9

Dolly (1996-07-05 – 2003-02-14), a Finn Dorsett ewe, was the first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult cell, though the first actual thing to be cloned, was a tadpole in 1952. She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland and lived there until her death when she was six. On 2003-04-09 her stuffed remains were placed at Edinburgh's Royal Museum, part of the National Museums of Scotland.

Dolly was publicly significant because the effort showed that the genetic material from a specific adult cell, programmed to express only a distinct subset of its genes, could be reprogrammed to grow an entire new organism. Before this demonstration, there was no proof for the widely spread hypothesis that differentiated animal cells can give rise to entire new organisms.

Cloning Dolly the sheep had a low success rate per fertilized egg; she was born after 277 eggs were used to create 29 embryos, which only produced three lambs at birth, only one of which lived. Seventy calves have been created from 9,000 attempts and one third of them died young; Prometea took 328 attempts. Notably, although the first clones were frogs, no adult cloned frog has yet been produced from a somatic adult nucleus donor cell.

There were early claims that Dolly the Sheep had pathologies resembling accelerated aging. Scientists speculated that Dolly's death in 2003 was related to the shortening of telomeres, DNA-protein complexes that protect the end of linear chromosomes. However, other researchers, including Ian Wilmut who led the team that successfully cloned Dolly, argue that Dolly's early death due to respiratory infection was unrelated to deficiencies with the cloning process.

The modern cloning techniques involving nuclear transfer have been successfully performed on several species. Landmark experiments in chronological order:

    * Tadpole: (1952) Many scientists questioned whether cloning had actually occurred and unpublished experiments by other labs were not able to reproduce the reported results.

    * Carp: (1963) In China, embryologist Tong Dizhou cloned a fish. He published the findings in a Chinese science journal which was never translated into English.[4]

    * Mice: (1986) was the first successfully cloned mammal; Soviet scientists Chaylakhyan, Veprencev, Sviridova, Nikitin had mice "Masha" cloned. Research was published in the magazine "Biofizika" volume ХХХII, issue 5 of 1987.[5]

    * Sheep: (1996) From early embryonic cells by Steen Willadsen. Megan and Morag cloned from differentiated embryonic cells in June 1995 and Dolly the sheep from a somatic cell in 1997.

    * Human: (November 1998) hybrid embryo created from leg cells and a cleaned cow egg - not allowed to implant in a womb, nor develop, nor be born due to ethical issues.

    * Rhesus Monkey: Tetra (female, January 2000) from embryo splitting

    * Cattle: Alpha and Beta (males, 2001) and (2005) Brazil[6]

    * Cat: CopyCat "CC" (female, late 2001), Little Nicky, 2004, was the first cat cloned for commercial reasons

    * Mule: Idaho Gem, a john mule born 4 May 2003, was the first horse-family clone.

    * Horse: Prometea, a Haflinger female born 28 May 2003, was the first horse clone.

Cloning, or more precisely, the reconstruction of functional DNA from extinct species has, for decades, been a dream of some scientists. The possible implications of this were dramatized in the best-selling novel by Michael Crichton and high budget Hollywood thriller Jurassic Park. In real life, one of the most anticipated targets for cloning was once the Woolly Mammoth, but attempts to extract DNA from frozen mammoths have been unsuccessful, though a joint Russo-Japanese team is currently working toward this goal.[14]

In 2001, a cow named Bessie gave birth to a cloned Asian gaur, an endangered species, but the calf died after two days. In 2003, a banteng was successfully cloned, followed by three African wildcats from a thawed frozen embryo. These successes provided hope that similar techniques (using surrogate mothers of another species) might be used to clone extinct species. Anticipating this possibility, tissue samples from the last bucardo (Pyrenean Ibex) were frozen immediately after it died. Researchers are also considering cloning endangered species such as the giant panda, ocelot, and cheetah. The "Frozen Zoo" at the San Diego Zoo now stores frozen tissue from the world's rarest and most endangered species.[15][16]

In 2002, geneticists at the Australian Museum announced that they had replicated DNA of the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), extinct about 65 years previous, using polymerase chain reaction.[17] However, on 2005-02-15 the museum announced that it was stopping the project after tests showed the specimens' DNA had been too badly degraded by the (ethanol) preservative. Most recently, on 2005-05-15, it was announced that the Thylacine project would be revived, with new participation from researchers in New South Wales and Victoria.

One of the continuing obstacles in the attempt to clone extinct species is the need for nearly perfect DNA. Cloning from a single specimen could not create a viable breeding population in sexually reproducing animals. Furthermore, even if males and females were to be cloned, the question would remain open whether they would be viable at all in the absence of parents that could teach or show them their natural behavior. Essentially, if cloning an extinct species were successful — it must be considered that cloning is still an experimental technology that succeeds only by chance. It is far more likely than not that any resulting animals, even if they were healthy, would be little more than curios or museum pieces.

Cloning endangered species is a highly ideological issue. Many conservation biologists and environmentalists vehemently oppose cloning endangered species — not because they think it won't work but because they think it may deter donations to help preserve natural habitat and wild animal populations. The "rule-of-thumb" in animal conservation is that, if it is still feasible to conserve habitat and viable wild populations, breeding in captivity should not be undertaken in isolation.

In a 2006 review, David Ehrenfeld concluded that cloning in animal conservation is an experimental technology that, at its state in 2006, could not be expected to work except by pure chance and utterly failed a cost-benefit analysis.[18] Furthermore, he said, it is likely to siphon funds from established and working projects and does not address any of the issues underlying animal extinction (such as habitat destruction, hunting or other overexploitation, and an impoverished gene pool). While cloning technologies are well-established and used on a regular basis in plant conservation, care must be taken to ensure genetic diversity. He concluded:

Vertebrate cloning poses little risk to the environment, but it can consume scarce conservation resources, and its chances of success in preserving species seem poor. To date, the conservation benefits of transgenics and vertebrate cloning remain entirely theoretical, but many of the risks are known and documented. Conservation biologists should devote their research and energies to the established methods of conservation, none of which require transgenics or vertebrate cloning.

Answer 10

It's better to preserve the ones that are left.  Cloned animals are notoriously unhealthy and short-lived, plus you'd have a to clone a lot because the clones would be hunted down just the same as the originals, in the case of tigers, and the reasons the others are becoming endangered would still be there. (Plus there are possible ethical issues.)

(They can reproduce.)