CHEYENNE, Wyo (AP). Scientists have cloned the first American endangered species, a black-footed ferret that has been duplicated from the genes of an animal that died more than 30 years ago.
The swinging predator named Elizabeth Ann, born on December 10 and announced Thursday, is cute as a button. But beware – unlike the domestic ferret foster mother who carried her into the world, she is wild at heart.
“You may have handled a black-footed ferret set and then they try to take your finger off the next day,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Coordinator, black-footed ferret-recovery coordinator, said Thursday. “She’s holding her.”
Elizabeth Ann was born and raised in a black-footed fish and wildlife service in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is a genetic copy of a ferret named Willa who died in 1988 and whose remains were frozen in the early days of DNA technology.
Cloning can eventually bring back extinct species such as the passenger pigeon. For now, the technique holds promise in helping endangered species, including a Mongolian wild horse that was cloned and born in a Texas birth last summer.
“Biotechnology and genomic data can really make a difference at the grassroots level with conservation efforts,” said Ben Novak, chief scientist at Revive & Restore, a biotechnology-focused conservation organization that coordinated ferret and horse cloning.
Black-footed ferrets are a type of weasel that can be easily identified by dark objects such as a robber mask. Charismatic and nocturnal, they feed exclusively on prairie dogs while living amidst the vast hollow colonies of rodents.
Even before cloning, black-footed ferrets were a success story for conservation. They were thought to be extinct – victims of habitat loss while farms shot down and poisoned prairie dog colonies that made farms less suitable for cattle – until a farm dog named Shep brought a dead house to Wyoming in 1981.
Scientists have gathered the remaining population for a captive breeding program that has released thousands of ferrets in dozens of sites in the western U.S., Canada and Mexico since the 1990s.
Lack of genetic diversity prevents an ongoing risk. All the ferrets that have been reintroduced so far are the offspring of only seven closely related animals – genetic similarity that makes the modern ferrets possibly susceptible to intestinal parasites and diseases such as silkworm.
Willa could also have transmitted her genes in the usual way, but a man born to her, Cody, ‘did not do his job’ and her sex became extinct, Gober said.
When Willa dies, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department sends her tissues to a ‘frozen zoo’ run by San Diego Zoo Global, which maintains cells of more than 1,100 species and subspecies worldwide. Finally, scientists can modify these genes to help cloned animals survive.
“With these cloning techniques, you can basically freeze time and regenerate the cells,” Gober said. “We are far from tampering with the genome to give any genetic resistance, but it is a possibility in the future.”
Cloning creates a new plant or animal by copying the genes of an existing animal. The Texas-based Viagen, a company that clones pet cats for $ 35,000 and dogs for $ 50,000, cloned a Przewalski horse, a wild horse breed from Mongolia that was born last summer.
Similar to the black-footed ferret, the approximately 2,000 surviving Przewalski horses are descendants of only a dozen animals.
Viagen also cloned Willa through coordination by Revive & Restore, a wildlife conservation organization focused on biotechnology. In addition to cloning, the nonprofit organization in Sausalito, California, promotes genetic research on obstructed life forms ranging from starfish to jaguars.
‘How can we apply some of the advances in science to conservation? Because storage needs more tools in the toolbox. That’s our whole motivation. Cloning is just one of the tools, ”said Ryan Phelan, co-founder and CEO of Revive & Restore.
Elizabeth Ann was born out of a tame domestic ferret, who avoided endangering a rare black-footed ferret. Two unrelated domestic ferrets were also born by caesarean section; a second clone did not survive.
Elizabeth Ann and future clones of Willa will form a new series of black-footed ferrets that will remain in Fort Collins for study. There are currently no plans to release them into the wild, Gober said.
Novak, the lead scientist at Revive & Restore, calls himself the group’s “passenger pigeon” for his work to one day bring back the common bird that has been extinct for more than a century. Cloning birds is considered much more challenging than mammals because of their eggs, but the group’s projects even involve trying to bring back a woolly mammoth, an animal that has been extinct for thousands of years.
The seven-year attempt to clone a black-footed ferret was, according to him, much less theoretical and shows how biotechnology can help conservation now. In December, Novak picks up a camper and drives with his family to Fort Collins to see the results firsthand.
“I had to see our beautiful clone in person,” Novak said. “There’s just nothing more incredible than that.”
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