Meet Kurt.
Who's technically been dead for 22 years.
You may have guessed it - Kurt is a clone.
And he's the first wild horse ever successfully cloned.
Which makes him quite a big deal!
And he wasn't just an experiment.
Scientists are now cloning endangered species to slow down the rate of
biodiversity loss and even improve entire ecosystems!
"In one word – it's just 'wow'!"
"Obviously, we want to save all the species that we can."
But how exactly would that work?
And how realistic is it?
Welcome to the very weird world of wild clones, gene banks and bringing species
back from the afterlife.
Cloning has been controversial around the world.
With legitimate concerns about us playing God – or creating endless copies of
species that wipe out biodiversity.
But Kurt's purpose is the exact opposite – to bring diversity back to his population
of wild Przewalski's horses.
So how is a clone – which is an exact genetic copy of another animal –
supposed to bring back biodiversity?
Well, bear with me.
All 2.000 Przewalski's horses alive today have descended from only
twelve wild ancestors.
To clone Kurt, researchers used a unique
gene that was frozen years ago, that would
have otherwise been lost from the pool.
And they used a domestic horse as a surrogate mother.
Kurt is not the first endangered species to be cloned.
There has even been a clone of an extinct species!
But with limited success.
The Pyrenean Ibex was cloned three years after it went extinct, using an old
frozen skin sample.
Researchers impregnated over 200 domestic goats.
Only seven became pregnant, one made it to term –
but the baby died minutes after it was born.
Less than one percent of wild clones ever survive – and the lack of research and access to
wild animals makes the entire process especially difficult.
With Kurt looking healthy, scientists hope he will be the first clone to
directly increase the genetic diversity of a population in the wild.
"And this is really cool because this represents a paradigm shift in
conservation. Where we're no longer reacting to crisis, but we're getting out
and being preventative.”
That’s Ben Novack, one of the scientists who cloned Kurt,
and has been pushing the idea of cloning for conservation.
"The idea behind it is that we can use cloning in multiple ways to help
endangered species, either by increasing the size of their populations or by using
it strategically to maintain genetic diversity."
Let's take a closer look at that.
Increasing population numbers can
help species recover, but scientists only
have a limited gene pool to choose from.
But the method being used here, is to add
to the strength of the genetic pool,
by bringing back genes that would have
otherwise died out.
This could make populations more resistant
to the effects of inbreeding and disease,
and even make them better at adapting
to climate change.
Biodiversity loss is an existential threat we face.
It puts our basic resources from pollination, water and food at severe
risk and poorer countries are likely to be the worst hit at first.
Species numbers are in such a freefall, that since the 1970s, species populations
have declined by around 60 percent!
Today, we could be losing up to 150 species each day.
Geneticists around the world have taken notice and are collecting and preserving
whatever genetic material they can in labs, zoos and gene banks.
"Tomorrow is too late.
I mean today is too late for many species, I'm sure.
So storing the DNA is like a last resort before they are gone.
So at least we will have the genetic heritage."
Ed Louis co-founded a British gene bank run by public universities,
museums and zoos.
Their consortium has collected over 48.000 samples so far.
While the main cloning experiments are taking place in the Western world,
especially the US, governments around the world have ramped up
their DNA collections too.
From India to China and in the Amazon – where researchers are collecting samples
of endangered species – banking on the technology to catch up.
"At least having that information there is useful.
Saving any species at all will mean it's been worth it."
Cloning is only one part of assisted reproduction – which also
includes artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilisation, and more recently, gene editing.
Scientists think these offspring won't just help their own species,
but their impact will extend on to ecosystems too.
"I want to create the world's largest and richest ecosystem, which will have more
wild animals than on our entire planet combined.
And I hope this ecosystem [will] help humankind to survive in the future."
Scientist Nikita Zimov has mapped out 20 square kilometers in the Arctic
for a highly ambitious experiment called the Pleistocene Park.
The aim is to give native animals like wild horses and others a place to return –
to play their role in an ecosystem that has been degrading for centuries.
"We are bringing animals. We try to bring them every year.
We adapt them. And the animals living in this ecosystem –
they're slowly changing the vegetation.
In the park you can see that there are more and more grasses growing."
It sounds a bit counter-intuitive – that animals that EAT grass can
bring grasslands back!
But this is the very principle that rewilding is based on.
Some species – like wild horses or even elephants –
are essential for their native ecosystems to survive.
Without the horse, for example, some grasslands of the steppe have been invaded
by moss and trees.
This means other species that depend on the grass are dying out.
Completely upsetting the balance.
Once the horses return, researchers hope they will chew it back down to grasslands
and bring the original steppe ecosystem back.
And this isn't just an obscure example – similar changes are being observed
around the world.
The EU has demarcated around a million hectares of land to bring wildlife back,
along with countries in Asia, and North and South America.
And healthy ecosystems act as carbon sinks – which slow down climate change.
But all this is very complex, and takes a lot of time.
Cloning Kurt is just one small step – depending on the species, we may need up
to 500 diverse animals to build a healthy wild population.
Over a 1000 zoos and research institutions around the world are working
on assisted reproduction of wild animals, including four projects devoted specifically
to cloning for conservation.
At the same time, conservationists are trying to bring attention back to the
massive number of other species we continue to lose.
"It's a real tragedy. We're losing species that are never going to be brought back,
even if we have the technology, no one's interested in resurrecting some
of these species.
The technology tends to focus on the large mammals,
the other things that are charismatic.
But we're losing lots of other things."
Bob Smith is a member of the
UN Environment Programme.
With the costs of such technology and rewilding still unknown, he insists that
more conventional approaches are still the main option.
“It's very attractive to think that we can have these sorts of technological fixes
but the reality is it's so much cheaper and more sensible to just go through and
try and conserve things now rather than assuming they'll go extinct
and we can bring them back.
So, you know, there's so many uncertainties about using cloning as an approach."
As well as uncertainties like unknown long-term effects, there are still
some ethical questions – even if we are trying to help nature here,
should we interfere?
"Is this interfering or is it interfering with our interference?
We are already playing God. We need biodiversity."
The race to conserve genetic diversity is on as a final attempt to save species.
Cloning may well strengthen some species – but do we accept such technology
as our future?
Could we ever re-build all that we are losing now?
We need to keep asking these questions – let us know your thoughts below.
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