Melbourne Australia — After nearly 100 years of extinction, the Tasmanian tiger may live again. Scientists want to revive the striped marsupial, officially known as the Tasmanian tiger, which once roamed the Australian bush.
The ambitious project will harness advances in genetics, ancient DNA retrieval and artificial breeding to bring the animal back.
“We strongly advocate that our biodiversity must be protected first and foremost from further extinctions, but unfortunately we are not seeing a slowdown in species loss,” said Andrew Pask, a professor at the University of Melbourne and chair of its integrated Thylacine. Genetic Restoration Research Laboratory, which is leading the initiative.
“This technology provides an opportunity to correct this and can be applied in exceptional circumstances where essential species have been lost,” he added.
This image, now extinct, shows a Tasmanian tiger (Tasmanian tiger) at Hobart Zoo, Tasmania, Australia, in 1933.
World History Archives / World Image Collection via Getty Images
The project is a collaboration with Colossal Biosciences, founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lam and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, who are working on an equally ambitious, if not more daring, $15 million project to bring back the woolly mammoth in a different form.
About the size of a wolf, the Tasmanian tiger disappeared about 2,000 years ago almost everywhere except on the Australian island of Tasmania. Being the only apex predator of marsupials that lived in modern times, it played a major role in its ecosystem, but this also made it unpopular with humans.
European settlers on the island blamed the Tasmanian tiger for livestock losses in most cases (although stray dogs and mismanagement of human habitats were in fact the culprits in most cases), and hunted the shy, semi-active Tasmanian tiger to the point of extinction.
An Australian hunter poses with a recently killed (now extinct) Tasmanian tiger (Thylacine) in Tasmania, Australia, in 1925.
Image 12/Global Image Collection via Getty Images
The The last Tasmanian tiger to live in captivity, named Benjamin, died in 1936 at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. This massive loss occurred shortly after the Tasmanian tigers were granted protected status, but it was too late to save the species.
genetic blueprint
The project involves several complex steps that incorporate the latest science and technology, such as gene editing and building artificial wombs.
First, the team will build a detailed genome of the extinct animal and compare it with the genome of its closest living relative – a carnivorous marsupial the size of a mouse called the fat-tailed Dennett – to determine the differences.
“We then take the living cells from our Dunnart and modify their DNA everywhere it differs from a Tasmanian tiger,” Paske explained. “We’re essentially engineering our dunnart cell to become a Tasmanian tiger cell.”
Once the team has successfully reprogrammed the cell, Pask said stem cells and reproductive techniques that include dunnarts as alternatives will “put that cell back into a living animal.”
“Our ultimate goal with this technology is to bring these species back to the wild, where they have played very essential roles in the ecosystem. So our ultimate hope is that you will see them in the forests of Tasmania again someday,” he said.
Bob Peddle, author of “The Last Tasmanian Tiger” is seen in a photo on Tuesday, May 28, 2002 in Sydney, Australia.
AP Photo / Rick Rycroft
The fat-tailed donart is much smaller than an adult Tasmanian tiger, but Baske said that all marsupials give birth to tiny chicks, sometimes the size of a grain of rice. This means that even a mouse-sized marsupial can serve as a surrogate mother to a much larger adult animal such as a thylacine, at least in the early stages.
Paske added that reintroducing the Tasmanian tiger should be done with extreme caution.
“Any release like this would require studying the animal and its interaction in the ecosystem over several seasons and in large areas of closed land before you consider a complete reconstitution,” he said.
The team did not give a timeline for the project, but Lamm said he believed progress would be faster than efforts to bring back woolly mammoths, noting that elephants take longer to conceive than Donarts.
Dave Watts/Jakana/Gamma-Ravu via Getty Images
The technologies could also help living marsupials, such as the Tasmanian devil, avoid the fate of the Tasmanian tigers as they contend with escalating bushfires as a result of the climate crisis.
“The technologies we are developing to eradicate the Tasmanian tiger have immediate conservation benefits – for now – to protect marsupial species,” Pask said. “Frozen tissue biobanks have been collected from live marsupial populations to protect against fire extinction.” E-mail.
“However, we still lack the technology to take that tissue – create follicular stem cells – and then turn those cells into a living animal. This is the technology we will develop as part of this project.”
Hybrid animals
However, the way forward is not cut and dried. Tom Gilbert, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s GLOBE Institute, said there are significant limitations to de-extinction.
Gilbert, who is also director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Evolutionary Holology, explained that reconstructing the complete genome of an animal missing from the DNA found in ancient Tasmanian tiger skeletons is a major challenge, and therefore some genetic information will be missing. He has studied the resurrection of the extinct Christmas Island rat, also known as the Maclear rat, but he was not involved in the Tasmanian tiger project. The team won’t be able to completely recreate the Tasmanian tiger, but instead will end up creating a hybrid animal, a variant form of the Tasmanian tiger.
“It is very unlikely that we will ever obtain the complete genome sequence of an extinct species, so we will never be able to completely reconstruct the genome of the missing form. There will always be some parts that cannot be changed,” Gilbert said by email.
“They will have to choose carefully what changes to make. So the result will be mixed.”
It’s possible, he said, that genetically imperfect hybrid Tasmanian tigers may have health issues and may not survive without a lot of help from humans. Other experts question the notion of spending tens of millions of dollars on de-extinctions when large numbers of living animals are on the verge of disappearing.
“To me, the real benefit of any de-extinction project like this is the beauty of this project,” Gilbert said. “Doing so seems very justified to me simply because it would interest people in science, nature, and conservation.”
“And we sure as hell need this in the wonderful citizens of our world if we are to survive in the future. But… do the stakeholders realize that what they are going to get will not be Tasmanian tigers but some imperfect hybrid? No need yet More people disappointed [or] I feel cheated by science.”
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