A paleogeneticist has warned that discussions should start around New Zealand’s response to the de-extinction of animals.
It comes after an American bio-engineering company, Colossal Biosciences, told RNZ it’s interested in extinct New Zealand species like moa.
Paleogeneticist Nic Rawlence, from the University of Otago, said thought needed to be put in place towards the unintended consequences of resurrecting extinct species and returning them to their former habitats.
“We don’t have to worry that it’s going to happen with the New Zealand species any time soon, given the technological conundrums or issues that need to be overcome,” Rawlence said.
“But we do need to have those discussions that if it ever does happen in the future, if science fiction becomes reality, that you’re not going to get bio piracy occurring, or these extinct animals trademarked, because that’s going to just cause a whole manner of problems.
“If we brought back the Haast eagle, the largest eagle in the world ... There are Māori legends of a feathered witch taking away children. What are the unintended consequences of bringing back a Haast eagle?”
Haast’s eagles had an estimated weight of 10-18kg.
“How many tourists are going to go missing on the great walks? Do we need to have eagle insurance? What conflict is going to result? Are we going to send the Haast eagle back into a bottleneck because people are going to start shooting them because they’re taking their sheep?
“Moa would fill some roles in ecosystems and ecosystem services around plant dispersal, and there are a whole lot of plants in New Zealand that evolved defences against being eaten by moa.
“And you could rightfully say the New Zealand forest hasn’t realised moa have gone extinct, but at the same time, we’re 800 years down the line, we don’t have some of the habitats that moa lived in.”
Currently, Colossal Biosciences is trying to bring back the woolly mammoth, while also working towards the resurrection of the Tasmanian tiger and the dodo, another flightless bird, claiming ecological reasons.
This month, the Texas-based company announced it had genetically engineered woolly mice, rodents with long, curly hair, but it’s still yet to conduct cold tolerance experiments.
The genetically modified mice embody several woolly mammoth-like traits, according to Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences.
It said the technology would be transferred to Asian elephants, the closest living relatives to mammoths.
Colossal Biosciences chief executive Ben Lamm said the company was interested in looking at New Zealand’s extinct bird species such as the moa in the future.
“We’ve been very public about this. Peter Jackson is one of our investors. We’ve had different conversations within New Zealand on different species including birds and other species, as well as protecting existing species,” Lamm said.
“We just raised another US$200 million [$347.22m], we are starting to look at additional species, both avian and mammalian.
“We’re starting to have more and more government conversations.
“We spend a lot of time working with private landowners, indigenous people groups, you know, folks within the Government, sometimes folks within the academic area of that world,” Lamm said.
New Zealand zoologist and former museum curator Mike Dickison disagreed humanity was closer to de-extinction.
“It’s been exactly the same message for over 10 years now, since the first talk about reviving more came up. Nothing ever came of that, except some people managed to attract some investor funding, but didn’t actually deliver anything,” Dickison said.
“We are all getting very sceptical, waiting for them to deliver, and it would be nice if media coverage actually looked back through their history of bold claims, and track to see whether these bold claims are actually, you know, on track.
An illustration of a group of Woolly Mammoths grazing in a field in the morning sun.
“There is no sign even on the distant horizon that these guys will actually be reviving a mammoth. The best they’ve been able to promise us is that they’ll introduce some genes from mammoth DNA into Asian elephants to make them a little bit resemble mammoths.
“But nobody, by even the remotest stretch, is going to be saying that’s a mammoth. Even introducing a hairy Asian elephant to the Siberian tundra would be a kind of slightly pointless exercise.
“There’s lots of ways you could fix the ecology of the Siberian tundra without spending millions of dollars making sad, cold, shivering Asian elephants. So this looks more to me like a fundraising and hype-driven enterprise than anything else,” Dickison said.
Both Dickison and Rawlence said they dispute Colossal Biosciences' claims that it will have bred a woolly mammoth calf by 2028.
Rawlence said currently the de-extinction of New Zealand birds was not scientifically possible and it had yet to overcome the chicken or egg conundrum.
New Zealand zoologist and former museum curator Mike Dickison. Photo / Ken Downie
“We don’t have a good moa genome. There’s one that has been published, you can think of it as a draft. It’s a draft manuscript for a book that we’re missing some of the pages, and of the pages we’ve got, we’re missing text,” Rawlence said.
“Even if we had a good genome that’s been sequenced, once we’d actually gone and trialed all of the thousands of moa bones to find the best bones to sequence a genome, the closest relatives of moa are tens of millions of years divergent.
“So the closest relative of moa is a group of birds called the tinamous, they’re small flying birds from South America. You have to go back 60 million years from moa to get to the common ancestor with tinamous.
“Then you’ve got to go back even further to get to some of the other living relatives, like emu and ostrich. And for a lot of moa, the eggs are bigger than what we know for emu and ostrich. So how are you going to bring a baby moa to full term, for example?”
