Can we Bring Back the Dodo?
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The dodo was a fat, flightless bird native to Mauritius, a small island east of Madagascar. It was first recorded in 1598 by the Dutch, and last seen in 1662 before it went extinct.
This is one extinction of many caused by humans, but it is remarkably famous; and with good reason.
The dodo evolved mostly free of predators, which meant it had the evolutionary luxury of giving up flight in exchange for extra stores of fat. It had no need to lay eggs on trees, or otherwise hidden from local wildlife, and so it didn’t.
This meant that the dodo was not even slightly scared of humans when they first showed up.
A meaty, flightless bird that was not in the slightest frightened by humans — it’s not hard to see where this is going.
It was easy meat for sailors, who were disgusted by the taste but ate it anyway. The hunting was extreme and constant; if the sailors were full, they would keep killing dodos so they could salt the meat and preserve it for later.
But hunting was not the most devastating thing that humans cast upon the dodos. The sailors brought with them various other animals, including dogs, cats, pigs, and crab-eating macaques.
The new invasive animals would compete with dodos for local resources, and to some, the dodos were one of the local resources — particularly to the pigs and macaques.
The pigs and macaques would eat the dodos, and there is some evidence that the macaques would eat the unprotected dodo eggs.
The dodo became increasingly rare, thanks to all these factors, until its last confirmed sighting in 1662. There are other alleged sightings after that, and it remains likely that the dodo was not yet extinct, but most sources agree that by 1700 the dodo was extinct.
Now, more than 300 years after its extinction, scientists are wondering whether they could bring back the dodo.
De-extinction may sound like a far-fetched concept, reserved for movies the likes of Jurrasic Park, but it is very possible. It is far more feasible to recover DNA from a bird that went extinct three centuries ago than from dinosaurs that went extinct 65 million years ago.
The idea, in theory, is simple: find a relatively conserved cell of the extinct species you want to clone and swap its nucleus with that of an egg of a close relative. For the dodo, that close relative would probably be the Nicobar pigeon.
This has already been done for one extinct species: the Pyrenean ibex. In all, 285 Pyrenean ibex embryos were made, 54 of which were transferred to goats, which would serve as surrogate mothers. One clone was born alive in 2003 (three years after the DNA was taken from the last living ibex), but it died after minutes due to lung problems — likely as a result of DNA damage caused by the transfer of the cell nucleus to the egg.
This raises a few issues, not only practical — if we couldn’t clone an animal after three years of its extinction, it will likely be much harder to clone a 300 year extinct one — but ethical.
As technology progresses, it is likely, but not guaranteed, we will gain the ability to bring back the dodo. But is it ethical to go ahead with the procedure knowing most clones are likely to die, and that those that don’t will be brought to an Earth utterly different from the one their ancestors inhabited? Only time will tell.
