CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) – Scientists have cloned the first endangered species in the United States, a black-footed ferret duplicated in the genes of an animal that died more than 30 years ago.
The slender predator named Elizabeth Ann, born Dec. 10 and announced Thursday, is pretty as a button. But beware, unlike the foster mother who brought her into the world, she has a wild heart.
“You may have been driving a black-footed ferret kit and then tried to pull your finger out the next day,” Pete Gober, coordinator of the U.S. Black-footed Fish and Wildlife Service’s blackbird recovery coordinator, said Thursday. “She’s holding on.”
Elizabeth Ann was born and raised on a black-footed ferret facility at Fish and Wildlife Service in Fort Collins, Colorado. It 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 could eventually recover extinct species such as the passenger pigeon. For now, the technique is promising to help endangered species, including a Mongolian wild horse that was cloned and was born last summer at a Texas facility.
“Biotechnology and genomics data can really make a difference on the ground with conservation efforts,” said Ben Novak, chief scientist at Revive & Restore, a nonprofit conservation organization focused on biotechnology that goes coordinate the cloning of ferrets and horses.
Black-footed ferrets are a type of weasel easily recognized by dark eye marks that resemble the mask of a thief. Charismatic and nocturnal, they feed exclusively on prairie dogs while living in the middle of the vast colonies of sometimes rodent dens.
Even before cloning, black-footed ferrets were a successful case in conservation. They were considered to have been extinct, victims of habitat loss, as ranchers shot and poisoned prairie dog colonies that made grazing land less suitable for livestock, until a cattle dog named Shep brought a dead house to Wyoming in 1981.
Scientists gathered the remaining population for a captive breeding program that has released thousands of ferrets at dozens of locations in the western U.S., Canada, and Mexico since the 1990s.
The lack of genetic diversity prevents continuous risk. All reintroduced ferrets to date are descended from only seven closely related animals: genetic similarity that makes current ferrets potentially susceptible to intestinal parasites and diseases such as sylvan plague.
Willa could also have passed her genes the usual way, but a male born of her named Cody “didn’t do her job” and her lineage became extinct, Gober said.
When Willa died, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department sent its tissues to a “frozen zoo” run by the San Diego Global Zoo that maintains cells of more than 1,100 species and subspecies worldwide. Finally, scientists can modify these genes to help the cloned animals survive.
“With these cloning techniques, you can basically freeze time and regenerate these cells,” Gober said. “We’re far from that when it comes to playing with the genome to confer genetic resistance, but that’s a possibility in the future.”
Cloning makes a new plant or animal by copying the genes of an existing animal. Viagen, a Texas-based company that clones cats for $ 35,000 and dogs for $ 50,000, cloned a Przewalski’s horse, a species of Mongolian wild horse born last summer.
Similar to the black-footed ferret, the 2,000 surviving Przewalski horses are descended from only a dozen animals.
Viagen also cloned Willa through the coordination of Revive & Restore, a biotechnology-focused wildlife conservation organization. In addition to cloning, the nonprofit organization Sausalito, California, promotes genetic research on endangered life forms ranging from starfish to jaguars.
“How can we apply some of these advances in science to conservation? Because conservation needs more tools in the toolbox. That is all our motivation. Cloning is just one of the tools, ”said Ryan Phelan, co-founder and CEO of Revive & Restore.
Elizabeth Ann was born with a tame domestic ferret, which avoided endangering a rare black-footed ferret. Two unrelated domestic ferrets were also born by cesarean section; a second clone did not survive.
Elizabeth Ann and future Willa clones will form a new line 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, Revive & Restore’s lead scientist, calls himself the group’s “passenger pigeon” for his work to one day recover the common bird that has been missing for more than a century. Cloning birds is considered much more difficult than mammals because of their eggs, although the group’s projects even include trying to recover a woolly mammoth, an extinct creature thousands of years old.
The seven-year effort to clone a black-footed ferret was much less theoretical, he said, and shows how biotechnology can now help conservation. In December, Novak loaded up a camper and went to Fort Collins with his family to see the results first hand.
“I had to see our beautiful clone in person,” Novak said. “There’s nothing more amazing than that.”
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