Author: Euan Ritchie

By Signe Dean, Science and Technology Editor, The Conversation.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In a newly announced partnership with Texas biotech company Colossal Biosciences, Australian researchers are hoping their dream to bring back the extinct thylacine is a “giant leap” closer to fruition.

Scientists at University of Melbourne’s TIGRR Lab (Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research) believe the new partnership, which brings Colossal’s expertise in CRISPR gene editing on board, could result in the first baby thylacine within a decade.

The genetic engineering firm made headlines in 2021 with the announcement of an ambitious plan to bring back something akin to the woolly mammoth, by producing elephant-mammoth hybrids or “mammophants”.

But de-extinction, as this type of research is known, is a highly controversial field. It’s often criticised for attempts at “playing God” or drawing attention away from the conservation of living species. So, should we bring back the thylacine? We asked five experts.

Axel Newton, Evolutionary Biologist at TIGRR Lab

YES, with a “but” (more on that shortly). The thylacine is one of the most tragic stories of the modern era, being actively hunted to extinction through a government bounty scheme. Unlike other extinct species, the thylacine was eradicated less than 100 years ago. Its habitat and ecological environment that it once thrived in is still intact.

I think we have an obligation to do everything in our power to bring back this remarkable animal, particularly as our forebearers were the direct cause of its disappearance. However, we also have an ethical and moral responsibility to ensure that the animal we resurrect is a 99%+ thylacine and not an almost-thylacine hybrid.

The largest challenge of this endeavour is reconstructing the genome of an extinct species without access to any living tissue (the difference between de-extinction and cloning). This equates to putting together a 3-billion-piece puzzle, with our hands tied behind our back.

Inevitably some argue that money used on this project could be put to better use through actively preserving habitats of animals on the brink. But this project will have enormous conservation benefits to already threatened species, and has the potential to generate significant advancements to human health.

The crux of this is through producing the genetic tools and methods to edit the DNA of stem cells, and then turn those stem cells back into an animal. This technology will not only meet our end goal of turning a surrogate marsupial cell into a thylacine, but in the process allow us to reintroduce genetic diversity into endangered populations. We could take bio-banked tissues of rare, endangered species, and produce animals to be reintroduced into the environment to increase beneficial genetic diversity. Not only this, but the work could be applied for targeted gene therapy to correct mutations underlying human health and cancer.

So, should we bring the thylacine back, yes. Not only for the fate of this incredible, lost species, but also the significant benefits this project will produce for humanity as a whole. As long as we keep the moral and ethical considerations at the forefront, we have an opportunity to correct the wrongs of the past.

Parwinder Kaur, Geneticist and Biotechnologist

MAYBE. It depends on the complex risks re-introductions of extinct species would have on our current ecosystems. Will such risks outweigh the potential benefits and fear unsuccessful environmental management actions?

Earlier this year, our DNA Zoo Australia team completed a chromosome-length 3D genome map of thylacine’s closest living relative: the numbat. This raised the tantalising prospect of piecing together the thylacine’s genetic sequence, which in turn would offer the possibility of reintroducing one of Australia’s most iconic lost species.

But the big question our team faced was: shall we go after resurrecting the dead, or help numbats first? Numbats are now struggling and on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 1,000 numbats left in the wild and the species officially listed as endangered. The answer was simple: focus on what we have first.

We live in exciting times when biotechnology offers various promising alternatives for achieving this purpose, and probably a better use of these techniques will be towards preserving critically endangered species on the verge of extinction.

In my opinion, focusing on de-extinction could compromise biodiversity conservation by diverting resources from preserving ecosystems and preventing newer extinctions. It is no trivial work in terms of resources and skills required to revive an extinct animal; given the low level of investments into conservation research, we need to be very careful as a scientific community to not prioritise preservation over resurrection.

Euan Ritchie, Wildlife Ecologist

MAYBE. There is much to consider with such an ambitious project. Most importantly, we must greatly increase efforts to save and recover living species, and it’s simply far cheaper and easier to conserve what we have than to attempt to resurrect species and their ecological roles.

This requires confronting the many causes for species decline & extinction, and, broadly speaking, our unsustainable existence and inability to share this planet with other species.

At current rates of species decline and extinction, de-extinction will not be able to come even close to resurrecting what we have destroyed. So which species do we try to bring back, and why? And, if it is even possible, will resurrected species behave the same way, will they perform the same ecological roles and affect ecosystems in the same way? I’m very doubtful.

However, we must stop perpetuating the idea that conservation is a zero-sum game, feeding a flawed narrative that we must choose which projects, species and ecosystems we support. A shortage of money isn’t the issue, values and priorities are. For perspective, it’s estimated Australia spent A$11.6 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2021–22, but recently only allocated A$10 million to 100 priority threatened species, fewer than 6% of the country’s listed threatened species.

It’s vital we maintain robust scrutiny and scepticism of ambitious projects, but we must also support scientists to push boundaries and take educated risks. And sometimes we learn, even when we ‘fail’.

Personally, I would love to see thylacines back in the wild, but I’m not optimistic we’ll see a self-sustaining and genetically diverse population of thylacines any time soon, if at all. If such projects are to proceed, I also hope that Indigenous people, and communities more broadly, are properly consulted and involved.

Julian Koplin, Bioethicist

YES. Most of us think we should protect ecosystems from damage and prevent animals from going extinct. This might be because we value nature for its own sake, or it might be because we think biodiversity is good for humans ourselves.

Importantly, both of these reasons also support de-extinction. One reason to bring back (approximations of) animals like the Tasmanian tiger and woolly mammoth is to help restore the ecosystems they used to live in; another is to bring humans a sense of wonder and awe, and perhaps even greater respect for the natural world. So, why not push ahead?

Perhaps the most serious ethical worry is that de-extinction is a poor use of resources; we could probably make a bigger difference to biodiversity by funding conservation efforts instead. But this objection isn’t decisive. The costs of de-extinction may come down over time.

Also, it’s unclear whether many people funding de-extinction efforts would otherwise have funded traditional conservation projects instead. We should keep an eye on the costs, but we shouldn’t reject de-extinction outright.

Corey Bradshaw, Ecologist

NO. While the scientific endeavour to demonstrate capacity to re-animate long-extinct species does have some merit, claiming that the approach will counter present-day extinction rates or could be used as a conservation tool is naïve.

Viable populations require thousands of genetically diverse individuals to be able to persist in the wild. There is simply no prospect for recreating a sufficient sample of genetically diverse individual thylacines that could survive and persist once released.

Also, large predators like thylacines require large home ranges to gather food, establish territories, and raise young. The reason they were driven to extinction in the first instance was due to perceived conflict with landholders, so even if the problem of genetic diversity could be solved, the social licence to re-establish a large population of predators is unlikely to be granted (consider the case of dingo persecution throughout most of Australia today).

Furthermore, the available habitats in Australia that could support a large population of thylacines have dwindled or been degraded radically since the early 19th Century. Combined with no-analogue climates of the immediate future due to global warming, it is unlikely that there would be sufficient available habitat to support a viable population.

By Euan Ritchie (Deakin University), Erin O’Donnell (The University of Melbourne), Gregory Moore (The University of Melbourne), Kristen Lyons (The University of Queensland), Peter Christoff (The University of Melbourne), and Stefan Kaufman (Monash University).

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Coral bleaching, floods, bushfire, biodiversity decline and extinction – as we witness the effects of climate change, amid a stream of reports warning of the cost of government inaction, it is easy to feel overwhelmed.

How to counter the gloom? We asked six environmental experts to each nominate a book about the climate crisis that offers hope.

Euan Ritchie recommends All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Keeble Wilkinson (2020)

Despair, disempowerment and division are all enemies of positive action, and crippling in the face of tremendous challenges such as the climate change crisis. All We Can Save is the antithesis of such emotions and concerns. Hope is a powerful motivator, especially when it’s delivered in such a creative, thoughtful, inclusive and diverse way.

Critically, All We Can Save brings together women’s voices, spanning culture, geography and ages. Women are still, shamefully, not heard nearly enough – and worse, actively suppressed in some instances and quarters. Society suffers because of this.

In this book, however, scientists, farmers, teachers, artists, journalists, lawyers, activists and others share their unique perspectives, through their essays, poetry and art. They explore how to confront the climate crisis, the damage already inflicted, but most importantly, how to bring about positive change and progress.

Food for the mind and soul, at at time when it’s needed more than ever.

Peter Christoff recommends Great Adaptations: In the Shadow of a Climate Crisis by Morgan Phillips (2021)

There is no point in pretending. There are no “good stories” about global warming. They are all framed by the crisis we refuse to talk about in Australia. We desperately need a national conversation about how to live in the perilous world forming around us.

Morgan Phillips’s Great Adaptations: In the Shadow of a Climate Crisis is not an Australian book. Its perspectives are international – British, European, Nepalese, North American.

Phillips doesn’t flinch from contemplating bleak prospects: systemic collapses, food and water insecurity, biodiversity decline. But his focus is neither on sheer doom, nor naive techno-optimism. He instead brings careful balance to his consideration of good adaptation and harmful (mal) adaptation.

He pushes us to think beyond fragmented reactions to individual climate catastrophes, such as droughts, fires, floods and storms – reactions that favour the wealthy and are based on the delusion that all will spring back to “normal”.

His aim is realistic “transformative adaptation”. He argues for enduring, flexible and equitable adjustments to nature’s new lottery. At the heart of his examples of success – from “fog harvesting” for water in arid Morocco to climate-responsive agro-forestry in Nepal – is the need for constant dialogue to guide adjustments to changing conditions.

Great Adaptations is a brilliant provocation for the discussion we must have.

Kristen Lyons recommends Who Really Feeds the World? The Failure of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology by Vandana Shiva (2016)

The climate crisis has accentuated already unjust and ecologically unviable global food systems. Australia’s recent bushfires and floods, for example, destroyed crops, devastated food-producing landscapes and their communities, and disrupted transport networks. Each laid bare a corporate controlled food system characterised by escalating food prices, growing rates of hunger, and food insecurity.

How might fair and just food systems be fostered – systems that are resilient in the face of climate chaos?

In Who Really Feeds the World? The Failure of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Vandana Shiva sets out principles and practices that may offer some solutions. Drawing on a range of examples from around the world, including the
Navdanya movement based in India (which she founded), Shiva presents agroecology, living soil, biodiversity and small-scale farming as life-affirming responses.

Small-scale farmers on small parcels of land already produce 70% of the world’s food. They really can feed the world.

The challenge then – one of many – is how we might breathe life into the principles advocated by this award-winning environmental activist, recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and Sydney Peace Prize. In an Australian context, this will include addressing the violent settler-colonial foundations upon which Australia’s agriculture and food systems have been built.

Erin O’Donnell recommends Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez (2022)

Raging fires, desperate droughts and unprecedented floods underscore the power and terror of the climate catastrophe. As we experience these brutal reminders of our dependence on healthy ecosystems, many of us are searching for a different way to reconnect with the world around us.

In Fresh Banana Leaves, Jessica Hernandez offers us the concept of “kincentric ecology”, in which the enduring relationship between Indigenous peoples and place is one of mutual interdependence.

She argues that “we are not separate from nature” and that “Indigenous peoples view their natural resources and surroundings as part of their kin, relatives, and communities”.

Hernandez’s book demonstrates the power of Indigenous science (and the leadership of Indigenous peoples) to help bring all of us back into good relations with nature. In doing so, she offers us a glimpse of a decolonised, just and sustainable future.

Stefan Kaufman recommends The Precipice: Exisiential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord (2020)

In The Precipice, Toby Ord considers a range of “existential risks” that could, in the next few centuries, curtail the immense potential for long-term human flourishing. It leaves me perversely hopeful about climate change for three reasons.

Firstly, while acknowledging that climate change will cause immense suffering, Ord only identifies a few, relatively unlikely scenarios that leave humanity extinct or “stuck” barely surviving.

Secondly, he considers a range of human-generated and natural risks that are of even greater concern. Many of these risks are exacerbated by the increasing accessibility of powerful technologies once available only to elites, such as bio-engineering and artificial intelligence. These are all risks that we either create or will need to cooperate to mitigate; their occurrence and their level of impact are within our influence.

Thirdly, Ord makes a compelling case that we have many of the institutions, technologies and policy tools necessary to manage long-term existential risks. There is work all of us can do now to help. Climate change can make many other risks worse. Solving it requires solving others at the same time.

The Precipice leaves one with a sense that we will need to be better humans to make it through the next centuries, but a brighter future awaits. If we attain this future, we will deserve to, because we will have married our power and prosperity with civilisational maturity, compassion and wisdom.

Greg Moore recommends Trees and Global Warming: The Role of Forests in Cooling and Warming the Atmosphere by William J Manning (2020)

As climates change and Australia warms, trees are often seen as a panacea, but, as is invariably the case with ecosystems, things can be complicated.

As William J. Manning tells us in Trees and Global Warming, trees can warm as well as cool the atmosphere. The colour of their leaves (light or dark green) influences how much radiation is absorbed, transmitted and reflected, and how much they cool.

Manning is not looking at trees and forests through rose-coloured glasses, but through a strong scientific lens. They come out as winners when it comes to tackling climate change because, cultivated effectively, they can shade and cool, reduce the urban heat-island effect, sequester carbon, and much more.

Trees are an essential, cost-effective and sustainable part of living with climate change. We must protect the trees and forests that we have. Planting more trees is part of a quick and cheap solution, providing more liveable towns and cities across our continent.

By Euan Ritchie (Deakin University) and Chris J Jolly (Macquarie University).

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For over two decades, bull sharks have called a Brisbane golf course home after, it’s believed, a flood washed them into the course’s lake in 1996. Now, after severe floods connected their landlocked home back to the river system, these sharks have gone missing, perhaps attempting to seek larger water bodies.

This bizarre tale is one of many accounts illustrating how Australia’s wildlife respond to flooding. But the sad reality is many don’t survive. Those that do may find their homes destroyed or, like those bull sharks and others, find themselves displaced far from their original homes or suitable habitat.

The RSPCA and other wildlife care organisations have received hundreds of calls to help rescue and care for stranded animals. But the true toll on wildlife will remain unknown, in part because we know surprisingly little about the impacts of floods on wildlife.

Still, as many animals have amazing abilities to survive fire, so too do many possess the means to survive or even profit from floods. After all, Australia’s wildlife has evolved over millions of years to survive in this land of extremes.

How wildlife responds to floods

Floods rapidly turn land habitats into underwater habitats, allowing aquatic animals to venture into places you wouldn’t expect. Flooding during northern Australia’s annual wet season, for example, sees crocodiles occasionally turn up in people’s backyard pools.

Land-dwelling animals typically don’t fare as well in floods. Some may be able to detect imminent inundation and head for higher, drier ground. Others simply don’t have the ability or opportunity to take evasive action in time. This can include animals with dependent young in burrows, such as wombats, platypus and echidnas.

The extent to which flooding affects animals will depend on their ability to sense what’s coming and how they’re able to respond. Unlike humans who must learn to swim, most animals are born with the ability.

Echidnas, for example, have been known to cover large areas of open water, but fast flowing, powerful floods pose a very different proposition.

Animals that can fly – such as many insects, bats and birds – may be able to escape. But their success will also partly depend on the scale and severity of weather systems causing floods.

Many birds, for example, couldn’t get away from the heavy rain and seek shelter, ending up waterlogged. If birds are exhausted and can’t fly, they may suffer from exposure and also be more vulnerable to predators, such as feral cats and foxes.

During floods, age old predator-prey relationships, forged through evolution, can break down. Animals are more focused on self preservation, rather than their next meal. This can result in strange, ceasefire congregations.

For example, a venomous eastern brown snake was filmed being an unintentional life raft for frogs and mice. Likewise, many snakes, lizards and frogs are expert climbers, and will seek safety in trees – with or without company.

Some spiders have ingenious ways of finding safety, including spinning balloon-like webs to initiate wind-driven lift-off: destination dry land. This is what happened when Victoria’s Gippsland region flooded last year.

One of the challenges of extreme events is it can make food hard to find. Some animals – including microbats, pygmy possums, and many reptiles – may reduce their energy requirements by essentially going to “sleep” for extended periods, commonly referred to as torpor. This includes echidnas and Antechinus (insect-eating marsupials), in response to bushfire.

Might they do the same during floods? We really don’t know, and it largely depends on an animal’s physiology. In general, invertebrates, frogs, fish and reptiles are far better at dealing with reduced access to food than birds and mammals.

What happens when floods recede?

Flooding may provide a bounty for some species. Some predators such as cats, foxes, and birds of prey, may have access to exhausted prey with fewer places to hide. These same predators may scavenge the windfall of dead animals.

Fish, waterbirds, turtles and other aquatic or semi-aquatic life may benefit from an influx of nutrients, increasing foraging opportunities and even stimulating breeding events.

Other wildlife may face harsher realities. Some may become trapped far from their homes. Those that attempt to return home will have to run the gauntlet of different habitats, roads, cats, dogs and foxes, and other threats.

Even if they make it home, will their habitats be the same or destroyed? Fast and large volumes of water can destroy vegetation and other habitat structures (soils, rock piles) in minutes, but they may take many years or decades to return, if ever.

Floodwaters can also carry extremely high levels of pollution, leading to further tragic events such as fish kills and the poisoning of animals throughout food chains.

How can you help?

Seeing wildlife in distress is confronting, and many of us may feel compelled to want to rescue animals in floodwaters. However, great caution is required.

Wading into floodwaters can put yourself at significant risk. Currents can be swift. Water can carry submerged and dangerous obstacles, as well as chemicals, sewage and pathogens. And distressed animals may panic when approached, putting them and yourself at further risk.

For example, adult male eastern grey kangaroos regularly exceed 70 kilograms with long, razor sharp claws and toe nails, and powerful arms and legs. They’ve been known to deftly use these tools to drown hostile farm dogs in dams and other water bodies.

So unless you’re a trained wildlife expert or animal carer, we don’t recommend you try to save animals yourself. There is more advice online, such as here and here.

If you’d like to support the care and recovery of wildlife following the floods, a number of organisations are taking donations, including WWF Australia, WIRES and the RSPCA.

What does the future hold?

While many Australian wildlife species are well adapted to dealing with periodic natural disasters, including floods, we and wildlife will face even more intense events in the future under climate change. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions can lessen this impact.

For common, widespread species such as kangaroos, the loss of individuals to infrequent, albeit severe, events is tragic but overall doesn’t pose a great problem. But if floods, fires and other extreme events become more regular, we could see some populations or species at increased risk of local or even total extinction.

This highlights how Earth’s two existential crises – climate change and biodiversity loss – are inextricably linked. We must combat them swiftly and substantially, together, if we’re to avoid a bleak future.