The peril of the planet is more urgent than ever and
one of the reasons we know that we're imperiled is not just climate change,
but the loss of all the species that support us and everything around us.
San Francisco used to be the fourth largest dune system in California.
From Ocean Beach and the Sunset and Richmond districts,
all the way through the Presidio and into downtown,
there were moving and mobile sand dunes, teaming with life. The wild things were abundant.
The San Francisco sand dunes had easily 40 species of butterfly.
The Xerces was one of the first recorded or documented cases
of an animal going extinct or being driven to extinction by human causes—
by developments, by habitat loss. The dunes that we're standing on top
of today were all paved over and essentially San Francisco lost the entire habitat to development.
We really know about Xerces because of the amazing collections that we have here at the Academy.
These collections that we've built really form the basis for understanding everything around us.
To better understand our future we have to know where we came from in the first place.
And so we have these incredible collections dating back hundreds of years,
or in the case of geology, millions of years, to understand our past.
And so we're able to look at the climates, the ecosystems before us
and it better informs where we're going as part of the ecosystem today.
We are restoring this habitat to bring back the wild things and protect biodiversity here in the city.
They involved several groups of scientists, butterfly lovers, and others to try to figure out
how to build the habitat. And one thing that's missing from that is the Xerces blue.
The role it would have played as a pollinator, pollinating all sorts of flowering plants.
It would have provided food for other animals that eat its caterpillars. It's part of the food chain.
So there's a balance there that we're trying to better understand and bring back to the Presidio.
By looking at the genome of an extinct—the extinct Xerces—and the genomes of surrounding butterflies
in the Bay Area today, we can hopefully understand and inform the process of what species might be
able to survive in the Presidio today. What were the components of the genome that might have
helped it survive the cold wintry summery weather of San Francisco? And as part of that process,
we hope to be able to de-extinct the role in the ecosystem—not necessarily the blue itself—but to
bring back a cousin that will be able to survive in the Presidio.
We're using really cutting edge methods with these really, really old and really, really valuable specimens.
Everyone always asks, you know, how can you bring something back
that's been gone for 20 years? 40 years? 150 years?
But the truth is you can look at all kinds of examples—from bringing beavers back to Scotland
to, of course, to reintroducing the wolves in Yellowstone—what dramatic ecosystem changes are
made that are so positive. So we can only imagine that even bringing back the littlest critters will
have tremendous impact.
By bringing them back we bring back the ability to build these habitats
and ecosystems to be stronger than they were. And the more redundancy of organisms and the
thicker that web of life, the stronger it can be.
Those healthy ecosystems are better resilient to drought, floods, and our impacts on them.
Anything that we learn about the process that we're developing through this particular project
has the ability to inspire other people to consider this work
and to recognize that we are essentially stewards of the world.