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CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Scientists have cloned the first endangered species in the United States, a black-footed ferret duplicated from the genes of an animal that died more than 30 years ago.
Slinky predator named Elizabeth Ann, born December 10 and announced Thursday, is cute as a button. But beware – unlike the domestic ferret adoptive mother who brought her into the world, she is mad at heart.
“You might have handled a black-footed ferret kit, and then they’re trying to take your finger off the next day,” US Fish and Wildlife Service’s black-footed ferret recovery coordinator Pete Gober said Thursday. “She’s holding on.”
Elizabeth Ann was born and raised at a Fish and Wildlife Service black-footed ferret breeding facility in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is a genetic copy of a ferret named Willa who died in 1988 and whose remains were frozen during the early days of DNA technology.
Cloning could eventually bring back extinct species such as the carrier pigeon. So far, the technique shows promise in helping endangered species, including a Mongolian wild horse that was cloned and born last summer at a facility in Texas.
“Biotechnology and genomic data can really make a difference in the field through conservation efforts,” said Ben Novak, senior scientist at Revive & Restore, a biotechnology-focused nonprofit that coordinated the clonings of ferrets and horses.
Blacklegged ferrets are a type of weasel that is easily recognized by dark eye markings resembling a thief mask. Charismatic and nocturnal, they feed exclusively on prairie dogs while living among the sometimes large burrows of rodents.
Even before cloning, blacklegged ferrets were a conservation success story. They were believed to be extinct – victims of habitat loss when ranchers slaughtered and poisoned prairie dog colonies that made rangelands less suitable for cattle – until a ranch dog named Shep brought back a dead one. at home in Wyoming in 1981.
Scientists have rounded up the remaining population for a captive breeding program that has released thousands of ferrets at dozens of sites in the western United States, Canada and Mexico since the 1990s.
The lack of genetic diversity prevents a permanent risk. All of the ferrets reintroduced so far are the descendants of just seven closely related animals – a genetic similarity that makes today’s ferrets potentially susceptible to intestinal parasites and diseases such as sylvatic plague.
Willa could also have passed on her genes in the usual way, but a male born to her, Cody, “didn’t do his job” and his lineage died out, Gober said.
When Willa died, the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish sent her tissues to a “frozen zoo” operated by the San Diego Global Zoo that maintains cells from more than 1,100 species and subspecies worldwide. . Scientists will eventually be able to modify these genes to help the cloned animals survive.
“With these cloning techniques, you can basically freeze time and regenerate these cells,” Gober said. “We’re a long way off now in terms of tinkering with the genome to confer genetic resistance, but it’s a possibility in the future.”
Cloning makes it possible to create a new plant or animal by copying the genes of an existing animal. Texan company Viagen, a company that clones pet cats for $ 35,000 and dogs for $ 50,000, has cloned a horse of Przewalski, a species of wild horse from Mongolia that was born last summer.
Similar to the black-footed ferret, the roughly 2,000 Przewalski horses that survived are the descendants of a dozen animals.
Viagen also cloned Willa through the coordination of Revive & Restore, a biotech-focused wildlife conservation organization. In addition to cloning, the nonprofit in Sausalito, Calif., Promotes genetic research into endangered life forms ranging from starfish to jaguars.
“How can we actually apply some of these scientific advances to conservation? Because conservation needs more tools in the toolbox. This is our whole motivation. Cloning is just one tool, ”said Ryan Phelan, co-founder and executive director of Revive & Restore.
Elizabeth Ann was born to a tame domestic ferret, who avoided endangering a rare black-footed ferret. Two unrelated domestic ferrets were also born by Caesarean section; a second clone did not survive.
Elizabeth Ann and future Willa clones will form a new line of black-footed ferrets that will remain in Fort Collins for study. There are currently no plans to release them back into the wild, Gober said.
Novak, the lead scientist at Revive & Restore, calls himself the group’s “passenger pigeon” for his work to one day bring back the once common bird that has been extinct for over a century. Cloning birds is considered much more difficult than mammals because of their eggs, but the group’s plans even include trying to bring back a woolly mammoth, a creature that has been extinct for thousands of years.
The seven-year effort to clone a black-footed ferret was much less theoretical, he said, and shows how biotechnology can help with conservation now. In December, Novak loaded up a motorhome and drove to Fort Collins with his family to see the results firsthand.
“I absolutely had to see our beautiful clone in person,” Novak said. “There is nothing more incredible than this.”
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