And why the thylacine? - Imelda, NSW
I think the thylacine is just an amazing animal in and of itself,
but it played an absolutely critical role in the ecosystem
in Tasmania. So in terms of why we might want to bring a species
back, there are a lot of really good reasons why the thylacine
should be top of everybody's list. It was an iconic animal
that had this really critical role; it was our only apex
predator that we ever had in marsupial's in Australia, and so
there's no other animal that can fulfill that space; we have
really good DNA for it, which means we can do a really good
job of bringing it back; and the ecosystem that it lived in still
exists in Tasmania, so there's somewhere to actually put that
animal when we bring this species back.
This was unthinkable 10 years ago. But today, we have all of
How realistic is 10 years? - Serge, VIC
the technologies we need to do this, it will just take a really
long time to do it. And I think if the things continue to move
forward as quickly as they have in the past 10 years, we may be
able to get there even quicker than a 10 year timeframe. But I
do think 10 years is quite reasonable to assume that we
would be at the point of having a fully edited thylacine cell
that we would then be looking at recreating whole animals from.
Who will own the patent? - John, VIC
So this is not patented, you know, this is something that
we're doing because we genuinely want to be able to put these
animals back into the wild. So this isn't something that you
know, you would have to buy a Thylacine, or could do it, these
would be - the whole idea of this project - is to rewild
these animals across Tasmania. There will be technology that
gets developed as part of this project that can be used and
patented for other uses, but in the conservation space this will
always be used just for the greater good of restoring lost
biodiversity.
Who will benefit financially? - Andrew, QLD
None of the stuff that I'm working on is being done to have
a financial gain, or to sell animals, or to create animals
for a commercial gain. It's really is about restoring lost
biodiversity.
It won't be genetically identical, so how will you
measure success? - Jarrad, NSW
And one of the questions I get asked all the time is, "do you
have the complete genome?", and the answer is yes we do, but
putting all of it back together is the bit that's really
complicated. So we know what every bit looks like. We don't
necessarily know where every little bit fits, in the bigger
piece of the of the puzzle that is the genome. And so that's
what we're working on is to make sure we have that complete
puzzle. And we're doing a lot of work right now, to make sure we
can really complete that entire sequence. And then the idea is
to re-engineer this animal to be 99.9% a thylacine, so to do as
many edits as we possibly can, and then at that level, you're
looking at the same amount of diversity that you might see
between you and me, for example, in our genomes. We have about
point 1% difference just between us and that would be about the
same level of difference that we would have for that thylacine
vs. any other thylacine in the population. And so when we
recreate it, and we get to that level, I feel really comfortable
saying that that is a thylacine, and that is the animal that, you
know, would go back into the wild as the genuine species.
Have you consulted Aboriginal elders? - Dominic, VIC
Yeah, we've consulted both in Tasmania, but also really
interestingly, in the Northern Territory as well. One of the
things that people don't often know about the Tasmanian Tiger,
How would you socialise thylacines? Jeff, WA
is it really isn't Tasmanian. It used to be across the entire of
mainland Australia. And in fact, all the rock art that we know
This is a really great question, is how would it know it's a
pretty much that exists for the Tasmanian Tiger is in the
thylacine? Obviously, we've talked a lot in the in our lab
northern part of Australia. And so we've spoken with groups up
and you know, with the work that we're doing about how we would
get to that first thylacine. We'd probably end up using a fat
there and elders up there, also in Tasmania, and we're really
tailed dunnart as the surrogate mom, which is a small mouse
passionate about involving them in the decision making process
sized marsupial. This is one of the amazing things about
around not just recreating the thylacine, but also the
marsupials is they give birth to tiny, tiny babies. In fact
rewilding aspects of the thylacine, which is obviously
some years down the track, but it's going to be really
thylacines, and that group of marsupial's, called the
important to discuss, you know, how they feel about where these
dasyurids, have the smallest babies of all the marsupials. So
animals might go. And also it played a really fundamental role
they're about the size of a grain of rice when they're born.
in some of the storylines from the First Nations people and so
So what that means is that even this little mouse sized
really getting them engaged in it so far, everybody's been
marsupial could actually give birth to a baby thylacine.
really excited about the project and really positive about the
Obviously, it's going to outgrow the pouch very quickly, but we
possibility of one day returning the species to its native
could keep it in the pouch for a few days, and then we'd have to
habitat again.
hand rear it from that point on. But then how does that
behaviorly impact that pouch young, will that grow up and
know that it's a thylacine? And this is a really interesting
question that we have and you can see this through a lot of
ecology, a lot of people will hand rear orphaned cubs or
animals from that bigger group of mammals, the placental
mammals, and it does seem that they do have a lot of hardwired
behaviors in their brain, particularly things like hunting
behaviors are incredibly hardwired in an animal's brain.
So we would think the animal would have an inherent knowledge
of being able to take down prey, eat and survive in a particular
environment. But again, I think you would want to breed the
thylacines in captivity for a few generations to make sure
that the thylacines that you actually might end up releasing
into Tasmania were raised by other thylacines that had had a
few generations to remember or to refine their place in that
ecosystem and to learn how to hunt and however they interacted
together, for that to come back again, before you would have
those animals that actually go off on their own into an
ecosystem.
How many would you need to make a viable population? - Beris,
TAS
This is a really great question too. So we're not talking about
just bringing back one animal and then cloning it, we're
actually sequencing the genomes of 50 Tasmanian tigers. So one
of the other great things about Tassie tigers, is there's a lot
of preserved material in museums all over the world. And so we
are able to get a really good snapshot of what their diversity
looked like and then engineering that diversity back into the
genomes to make sure we have a healthy population, that's not
just going to survive, but hopefully thrive once again, in
that ecosystem, we can actually engineer those changes and
differences in. And looking at the diversity so far, we
probably have to engineer about 40 different genotypes or 40
different animals, to give us a really good healthy population
that could really thrive.
If it doesn't work the first time, will you try again? -
Vera, TAS
Absolutely, and I think most things in science don't work the
first time and that we have to go through this process of
learning about how we do this sort of work and how we change
things and how we adapt things. But we're working with some of
the biggest groups in the world that are also working on dodo
de-extinction projects, and the mammoth de- extinction projects.
And we're all sharing our ideas and advances that we're making
in this space, to make sure that we're learning from each other
and we're doing this as efficiently as possible. But
absolutely, this will, I will keep doing this, until we have
our thylacine and once we've got our thylacine, I'll start
working on something else that we need to bring back. So
definitely, we will keep going on this.
What value do you place on the lives of individual animals and
their interests? - Adam, VIC
I think that all of these species have a role to play in a
much broader ecosystem, every single animal, including us, has
a place in these giant webs and then when we've come in as
humans, and we've exterminated groups of animals, or a
particular species, like the Tasmanian Tiger, when we've
persecuted that animal and removed it so quickly, I think
if we have the technology to bring those species back in to
put them back into that environment, we really owe it to
those species and those individuals to have that place
back in the ecosystem once again. And so I think all of
these animals play an incredibly valuable role. And if we have
the technology to bring them back, I think we owe it to the
species to bring them back.
How confident are you really? - Nicholas, VIC
I'm 100% confident that we will be able to recreate species,
this will be something that is going to happen much more
commonly in the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And I think we really
need to start, as a community, having discussions around what
barriers or limitations we might want to put on the use of this
technology, what species have been gone for too long to bring
back; what are the rules around what is a great species to bring
back versus one that's not so great to bring back. And I think
that's a really important discussion we have to have,
because the reality is we are very, very good at genetic
engineering now. We are very good at cloning and creating
animals, and so this is just combining those two technologies
together. There's nothing that we need to recreate the
thylacine, that we don't have in terms of technology. We have all
of the technology to do it, it's just a really big job and we're
getting more efficient at how quickly we can do it. But it's
certainly something that's going to happen. And once that becomes
much easier and more tractable, once we can make DNA edits much
faster, then it really opens up the floodgates of what sort of
species we can bring back and how we want to use this
technology thoughtfully, I think to really protect the globe
against big biodiversity losses.
Yes or no, can you bring back Elvis? - Liam, QLD
Yes, it's been much easier to bring back humans for a very
long time than it is to do this sort of work. In fact, you know,
humans, we are very good at assisted reproductive
technology, we know much more about how to create human
embryos than we do anything else. So the human cloning thing
has been around for a very long term in terms of the possibility
of doing it. Obviously, ethically, we don't do it and we
wouldn't do it. So there's an ethical barrier there but not
actually a scientific barrier to doing that sort of work.