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The dodo was the first animal that we watched go extinct due to human intervention -- could it be the first animal we bring back? Learn more about the dodo and de-extinction in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/extinct-animals/dodo.htm
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Episode: https://omny.fm/shows/brainstuff/could-we-resurrect-the-dodo
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Episode: https://omny.fm/shows/brainstuff/could-we-resurrect-the-dodo
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Episode: https://omny.fm/shows/brainstuff/could-we-resurrect-the-dodo
Podcast: https://mypod.online
Episode: https://omny.fm/shows/brainstuff/could-we-resurrect-the-dodo
Podcast: https://mypod.online
- Broadcast on:
- 26 Sep 2024
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Everyone loves getting good advice and staying in the know. There's nothing like getting a heads up on something before you've even had time to think about whether you need or want it. Well, thankfully AT&T provides personalized recommendations and solutions so you get what's right for you. Whether right for you means a plan that's better suited for you and your family or a product that makes sense for you and your lifestyle. So relax and let AT&T provide proactive recommendations to help empower your best connected life. Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey BrainStuff, Lauren Volbebaum here. The Dodo, a bird that went extinct in the 1600s and was then made famous in traveling exhibitions and works of fiction. May be ready for a comeback. Our researchers have been working on the de-extinction of the Dodo for at least 20 years, digging into its DNA in hopes of finding a way to resurrect it. But let's step back a bit and get to know the Dodo, an animal that continues to live quite a life in popular culture and our lexicon, even after its extinction more than 300 years ago. They lived in the forests of Mauritius, a what's now an island nation in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar off the coast of Africa, but was then an unsettled wilderness. We know that Dodos were large flightless birds, land-bound cousins of the dove in pigeon, but a lot of the details about what they looked like and how they lived are based on centuries-old European travel journals and artists' accounts, plus what modern scientists have managed peace together from their remains. We think that Dodos grew to about two to three feet in height up to a meter and weighed up to 40 pounds or around 17 kilos. Their feathers probably varied from shades of brown and gray to white and black, and they had a large hooked beat with an exaggerated bulb at the tip. Their wings were undersized and not developed for flight. Although they've long been portrayed as slow, heavy, unintelligent birds, their name has become a synonym for dim-witted. A recent analyses show that they were pretty proportionate to other birds, no more plump than your average well-fed pigeon or chicken. Those unkind portrayals stem from the fact that when Portuguese and Dutch explorers and colonizers arrived on Mauritius, starting in 1598, Dodos were filling a very specific evolutionary niche. These birds had no natural predators, and they didn't fear humans. The curious birds would sometimes approach people and could be easily herded into pens or onto ships to be used as a food source or a traveling curiosity. Their lack of flight combined with other strange-seeming actions, such as eating small rocks, which scientists now believe aided in digestion, a contributed to Dodo's reputation as stupid, lazy birds. The poor things were labeled with a species name "ditus ineptus" for years after the word inept. But in reality, the existing bone specimens we have from them suggest their feet and claws were powerful along the lines of fast, active land birds that run and climb. They likely hunted fish and feasted on seeds and fruit. They didn't need wings, so their bodies eventually poured those resources into other specialties. The Dodo is the first animal that Europeans found and then found to have disappeared, a the first case of extinction that European science observed. It was a convenient narrative that the birds weren't fit for survival, though in reality, they were perfectly fit for the environment they'd developed in. The Dodo went extinct because of one reason, humans. The Portuguese and Dutch introduced dogs, rats, pigs, monkeys, cats, and other animals to Mauritius. These animals ate the bird's eggs, which were laid on the ground. The humans hunted the Dodos for food, even though the meat reportedly wasn't very good, and took Dodos abroad to be displayed in exhibits. In the course of about 80 years, the bird and its eggs were hunted to extinction. Over the next century, tales about the Dodo fell almost into legend until a wave of new scientific interest hit in the mid-1800s, leading to an intense publicly reported "Scrabble for Bones" in the 1860s. This is also when Lewis Carroll published his mythologized depiction of a bumbling gentleman Dodo in his book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But going was hard for the would-be Dodo anatomists. The people who had originally encountered Dodos hadn't thought to preserve their eggshells or bones for the most part. Many Dodo bones have since been discovered in the swamps of Mauritius, but the environment has a corrosive effect. Only two complete skeletons have been found, one in 1904 and one in 2007, the bladder of which has been nicknamed Fred. There's another specimen of particular interest, a skull from a bird that may have been exhibited when it was alive in a London shop in the 1630s. It wound up in the Oxford Museum, and it's the only known Dodo specimen that still has soft tissue attached. Relatively well-preserved finds like these raise the question, could scientists raise the Dodo bird? Though some experts contend it will never be possible, a great debate is underway in science about whether it's ethical to bring an extinct species back to life. As Jeff Goldblum's character famously put it in the original Jurassic Park film, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. And now we're not too worried about rampaging herds of Dodos. The should is more that, okay, but some animals are driven to extinction by human action, but others simply can't survive in their habitat due to natural pressures, or because of some major change in climate. Earth has gone through several mass extinctions, and bringing back these creatures could throw the world's ecosystems into chaos. There's the question of where these creatures would go, especially since many extinct creatures have no natural predators, except for humans. Would putting a saber-tooth tiger in the Siberian tundra disrupt local food chain in addition to terrorizing the locals? The alternative is keeping recreated species in a Jurassic Park like zoo or nature preserve, but is creating a limited life for these creatures itself unethical. All of this aside, we're also stuck on the could part of the equation too. If we had viable DNA from a Dodo, we could hypothetically implant it into the egg cell of a related existing species, probably a type of pigeon, and grow a clone of the original Dodo DNA donor, assuming that we could get the egg to develop, hatch, and live. But we don't have viable DNA. So far, the warm climate amorousius has proven unhelpful in preserving the DNA in Dodo's bones, and only relatively poor quality DNA has been extracted from the Oxford Dodo. However, a researcher's have been working on reconstructing the Dodo's genome, which is a complete DNA map of a living creature. There's a concept that we might be able to take a cell from probably a pigeon and use modern genetic engineering techniques to edit the cell's genome to match the Dodos. Again, you'd then have to implant the genome into an egg cell and it would have to develop from there, possibly with help from a surrogate bird. And now, as of 2022, a team out of UC Santa Cruz reported that they have reconstructed the Dodo's genome, but there are still lots of other problems to crack. Egg pun, absolutely intended, who are we kidding? Birds are harder to clone than mammals, because their egg cells don't develop the same way. It would also first have to genetically engineer a pigeon large enough to develop and lay a Dodo egg. And even at the point that we managed all of that, this hypothetical Dodo chick wouldn't have any family to look to to learn how to act like a Dodo. At that point, could we really say that we'd resurrected them or just something that looks like them, pretty much as close as we figure? It's a lot of expensive questions to answer, though, of course, solving problems in genetics has potentially much more far-reaching results. If we could bring back a Dodo, could we help save existing species before they hit the point of extinction? Imagine a future where going the way of the Dodo actually meant making triumphant return. Today's episode is based on the article, "Could Scientists Resurrect the Dodo Bird?" on howstuffworks.com, written by Jacob Silverman. Brainstuff is a production of iHeartRadio partnership with Howstuffworks.com and is produced by Tyler Clang. 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