"Dire wolves" are now a real thing

Recreating extinct animals, especially animals that have no purpose, seems a bit stupid to me. What is the point? What can anyone do with them? They surely cannot be released into the wild.
This an example of scientist wasting time and effort on projects that have little or no benefit to anyone, other than showing what can be done.
 
Here's the (right-wing) political angle to all this and why vampires like Peter Thiel are backing Colossal BioSciences and just had the CEO Ben Lamm appear on Joe Rogan's podcast. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum spells it out clearly: If we can allegedly revive species with dubious "de-extinction" technology, then we don't have to bother with conservation and can rip apart the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and other "obsolete" regulations that are standing in the way of industry. Here's his stupid tweet:

"The Department of the Interior is excited about the potential of “de-extinction” technology and how it may serve broader purposes beyond the recovery of lost species, including strengthening biodiversity protection efforts and helping endangered or at-risk species.

The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: once a species enters, they never leave. In fact, 97 percent of species that are added to the endangered list remain there. This is because the status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation.

It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation. Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list - not additions. The only thing we’d like to see go extinct is the need for an endangered species list to exist. We need to continue improving recovery efforts to make that a reality, and the marvel of “de-extinction” technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.

Since the dawn of our nation, it has been innovation – not regulation – that has spawned American greatness. The revival of the Dire Wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder, showcasing how the concept of “de-extinction” can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation."

This is all part of a broader assault on the environment and wildlife conservation from this administration:

Legal Protections for Wildlife in Jeopardy as House Hosts Oversight Meeting - Inside Climate News

Conservationists Sound Alarm as Republicans Take Aim at Endangered Species Act | Common Dreams

Trump signs executive orders aiming to boost oil and gas drilling

Greenpeace loss will embolden big oil and gas to pursue protesters: ‘No one will feel safe’ | Greenpeace | The Guardian

The tiny lizard that will test Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda

Nonprofit that rescues marine animals faces uncertainty over federal funding

Trump administration rolls back protections for rare whales off Florida coast

Wildlife and Conservation Scientists Are Next in Line for Trump’s Chopping Block – Mother Jones

Fired California NOAA scientists warn of dire global consequences

What Trump’s order on cutting federal forests could mean for the Pacific Northwest | The Seattle Times

Trump orders swathes of US forests to be cut down for timber | Donald Trump | The Guardian

These Unique Black-Footed Ferrets Are on the Edge of Extinction. Trump’s Cuts May Well Do Them in. – Mother Jones

Spotted owls are disappearing fast, and federal cuts could mean no one's left to count them - Los Angeles Times

Trump Cuts May Leave More Elephants and Rhinos Vulnerable to Poachers – Mother Jones
 
My 2 cents on this whole thing. This is probably the most idiotic thing I've ever seen regarding wild animals.

First of all, these things aren't dire wolves, they're nothing more than genetically edited gray wolves so they would look more like dire wolves. Dire wolves were from a different canid lineage that simply looked similar to gray wolves via convergent evolution. Unfortunately, the public is highly incapable of doing basic research into this, so naturally they eat up these headlines like candy and now, as we can see in post #47 our Interior Secretary is also eating up the de-extinction concept. Which leads me to my next point.

With de-extinction, people won't take the idea of saving endangered species as seriously because they'll think they can simply bring them back, when truth is, all you'll end up having are either hybrids or genetically edited relatives of said species, never the actual species itself. Extinction is forever. But, to put it bluntly, people are too stupid to realize that. And it'll still be the case when a "resurrected species" no longer has the habitat to be released in because people didn't try to save the actual animal.
 
SeaOtterHQ said:
It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation. Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list - not additions. The only thing we’d like to see go extinct is the need for an endangered species list to exist. We need to continue improving recovery efforts to make that a reality, and the marvel of “de-extinction” technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.
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Pantheraman said:
Extinction is forever. But, to put it bluntly, people are too stupid to realize that.
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This was always my biggest concern with the whole 'de-extinction' idea... I recall at some point on this forum I posted

"I think there is one element to de-extinction not fully appreciated by its pariahs. Generations have grown up knowing of the woolly mammoth and dodo and how they are no longer alive. They represent, semiotically, something that was but is no more. They hold us in humiliation, but in accountability also. If the day ever comes that the neo-dodo takes its first steps onto the forest floor of Mauritius, what effect would that have on the minds of lawmakers and politicians - that what was is again? Would they feel the same way about species on the 'highway to hell' as they did before... or would this convince them that this can be done with anything? As in, 'it's not a big deal that an animal goes extinct, we can just bring it back!'"

And now within just four months of posting that, I am seeing with my own eyes the politicians cosying up to the idea that we don't need to put in the effort of making things better for our planet... we can just bring it back anyways!

Ever since January 20th, The Inauguration ... I have had a certain feeling that the fight; against big companies who, in the path towards the fantasy of exponential growth, trample all that lives in their trawl; has been lost... and the thing we are hurtling towards will be hellish in many respects. I try to hold hope, that whatever we are living through right now will come to an end, and one day the children of this generation will read about this time, and think "was he really the President?" "were people that naive?" "how weird!" That's a thought I like to cling to... but sometimes it's difficult.
Also... it's post #47... about the detrimental effects of the current administration :D
 
There are applications of biotechnology (engineering of disease resistance in honeycreepers, cloning of species with small populations to boost genetic diversity) that I believe to have genuine relevance to conservation biology…there are de-extinction prospects (the Chinese Paddlefish, Gastric-brooding Frog, and various island-endemic birds come to mind) that, though personally intriguing, are nonetheless theoretical and realistically still a long way off…and then there’s Pleistocene rewilding, which is quite another thing. I suppose that is where I draw the line.

Aside from the aforementioned points that 1. the animals in question are assuredly not A. dirus unless the obsolete morphological species concept is invoked, and 2. the general public (and indeed politicians) may well be convinced that “extinction is no longer forever” (likely ignoring that de-extinction would in any case be more costly than preventing extinction in the first place) and thus lose sight of preventative conservation, it importantly seems rather dubious to me that rewilding with engineered replicas of Pleistocene animals would do any good to Anthropocene ecosystems, and even if it did, whether it would be any better than subsidizing still-living species instead.

The_Leopard_Seal said:
Colossal is a sham. And resources would be better spent on trying to preserve living species than trying to bring back extinct species.
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Supposedly, they have been involved in activities such as the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells and an EEHV vaccine (in the latter case collaborating with the Houston Zoo, for better or worse), both of which are of relevance to living elephants:
DERIVATION OF ELEPHANT INDUCED PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS
Multi-Antigen Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpesvirus (EEHV) mRNA Vaccine Induces Humoral and Cell-Mediated Responses in Mice - PubMed
The best-case scenario would be that Colossal is using the popular appeal of de-extinction merely as a means to fund serious conservation research (note the apparent lack of mention of mammoths in these papers), but the fact that they have now produced live animals and are claiming a successful de-extinction would indeed suggest that this perhaps isn’t the case.

I suspect that with all this attention surrounding the pseudo-Dire-Wolves, any Red Wolf reintroduction projects will be put on hold for the foreseeable future. I can at least say that insofar as ARAs are involved in all ethical matters pertaining to elephants, we won’t be seeing any “pseudo-mammoths” anytime soon (it has always been scheduled for “four years in the future” anyway) …but really, who can tell?
 
Birdsage said:
Aside from the aforementioned points that 1. the animals in question are assuredly not A. dirus unless the obsolete morphological species concept is invoked
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Surely even any reasonable scientist using the morphological species concept would not consider these animals Dire Wolves - we don't even know what Dire Wolves looked like and it was probably quite different from this. That would be like calling a hairy person a chimpanzee.
 
This thread is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the internet.
I didn't even look when I saw the first image and "the howl not heard for 10000 years", because I thought this must be something silly, and then the next morning, the internet had exploded with it and multiple people (friends and family) sent me the articles personally.
Nothing I've seen since has impressed me at all.

They really just altered 14 genes in a grey wolf and said "that's a dire wolf" (I think we should just start calling them Aenocyon to separate the real animal from the giant fantasy wolf in the public's mind). It's like altering an elephant to give it fur... not adding mammoth genes, but actually just editing the elephant genes - and calling it a mammoth. Or, outside of the laboratory, the Quagga Project breeding "quaggas" from zebras. They're not quaggas, they're brown zebras. (And then, they are still much more closely related than Canis to Aenocyon)

Beyond that, I find it very suspicious that the white coat color they added... for reasons... made the pups white. If you know anything about wolves, you know that white (Arctic) wolves are brown-grey as pups. This makes me wonder if they got the white coat gene from domestic dogs.

Then I looked at the older pups, and having been around the wolfdog community for over a decade, I think they look more like white shepherds than any actual wolf. Mid-content wolfdog at best.

Groupies would say "but that's just the dire wolf genes, that they don't look like wolves is proof!"
Nah.

I think, in a not too distant future, Colossal will be revealed to be a complete and utter scam, to the extent of "Mars One" which went viral in the mid-2010s as it was supposed to create a human settlement on Mars by 2023 (while it was in fact bankrupt due to fraud by 2019).
 
oflory said:
I'm far from a direwolf expert but wouldn't they have looked like a rather more heavy-set dhole or Cape hunting dog rather than a Game of Thrones wolf....?
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Heck, for all we know they could've had small ears, black fur, etc. We're never gonna know what dire wolves truly looked like. Despite what this scam of an outfit claims.

And another thing about "de-extinction". The only animals that people will try to resurrect are charismatic species because those are the ones people love the most, and the ones people can be the most easily distracted by as more habitat gets destroyed. Several non-charismatic species like several invertebrates, amphibians, etc would never get resurrected because people don't care about them as much.
 
Though I think that genome editing such as this has some potential for conservation, I can't help but feel that Colossal is very premature in their celebration of this. It's like if you took the script of West Side Story, changed the characters names to the ones from Romeo and Juliet, and claimed that it was Shakespeare's play.

If these animals were exactly like Dire Wolves inside and out then that would deserve commendation, but I doubt that the animals from 10000 years ago looked like the ones they are advertising. If one put these animals in southern California, do you think they would thrive? It seems more likely Colossal is relying on the pop-culture vision of snow-loving 'dire wolves' in fantasy and the like.

If Colossal wanted to put this version of 'deextinction' to the test, they should try to do it for an animal that has a known distinct appearance, such as Aurochs. Then we would see if their genome edits are actually expressing themselves properly.
 
With impeccable timing, Trump just signed a new executive order paving the way for the destruction of the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Coastal Barrier Resources Act, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (the irony!), and more.
This order applies to the following agencies and their subcomponents: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); the Department of Energy (DoE); the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC); and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It further applies to the following agency subcomponents: the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), all within the Department of the Interior; and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), within the United States Army.
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For the FWS, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the following statutes and any amendments thereto:
(i) the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act;
(ii) the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918;
(iii) the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act of 1934;
(iv) the Anadromous Fish Conservation Act of 1965;
(v) the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972;
(vi) the Endangered Species Act of 1973;
(vii) the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976; and
(viii) the Coastal Barrier Resources Act of 1982.
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Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy

Smaggledagle said:
Even though the dire wolf sounds enticing (and not probable in the slightest), what I'm more focused on is the company's attempt at bringing in new genes into the red wolf population through the "Ghost Wolf".
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Like everything else Colossal Biosciences is doing, this also seems fraught with deliberately misleading language and grandiose promises that likely can't be fulfilled with current technology (see the attached image of the Red Wolf Coalition's comment). Here's Joseph Hinton, Senior Research Scientist at the Wolf Conservation Center:

"Recent news of Colossal Biosciences Inc. cloning of wolves was hard to ignore this week. As the Senior Research Scientist at the Wolf Conservation Center, I have spent my professional life dedicated to the conservation of Red Wolves in the wild and know first-hand the challenges that their recovery faces. Although cloning has some potential to serve among existing conservation tools, there are more immediate and effective methods to promote long term survival and well-being of Red Wolves. Cloning is a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist for Red Wolves.

In addition to the 16 Red Wolves in the wild, there are currently 270 Red Wolves in captivity that are waiting to be released to the wild. They represent the historical Red Wolf, which resulted from thousands of years of natural selection. They reproduce naturally in captivity and in the wild – we don’t need to clone them.

The cloned “Red Wolves” are not Red Wolves. They were derived from coyotes captured in southwest Louisiana for the Gulf Coast Canid Project. I know these were coyotes because I served as field supervisor and captured 44 coyotes for the project during 2021–2022."

Is Cloning the Future of Red Wolf Conservation? No.

And now note the remark from Colossal CEO Ben Lamm to Doug Burgum:

a-collection-of-statements-from-the-wolf-conservation-v0-pdlgzzlor1ue1.jpg
 
If I recall correctly, one of the problems with Red Wolf genetics is that so many of the specimens studied are from when the species was already in decline, and thus had begun to mix with coyotes. So creating a facsimile of the genome is difficult when there is not much agreement over what the Red Wolf genome is.
 
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