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REAWAKENING EXTINCT SPECIES VIDEO

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when a species goes extinct at the end or is it scientists are trying to bring back extinct species everything from the woolly mammoth to what was once the most abundant bird in the world if we do that just right they laugh egg and out hatches a passenger pigeon might be a way to correct past mistakes but just because we can should we coming up on Quest Reawakening extinct species support for KQED science is provided by the National Science Foundation the follis family fund the Mary van Voorhees fund the SD Bechtel Jr Foundation the David B gold Foundation the dirt and Charlene kabcenell Foundation the Valdez Family Foundation the Wyncote foundation and the Amgen Foundation support is also provided by the members of KQED I never wore boots growing up North Dakota Cowboy Country van I never wore them so these are my grandfather's boots when he passed away it turned out that I was the only one in the family who has the exact same size he is so so I took his boots and I've been wearing them ever since the first pigeon I Ever Raised was given to me by my grandfather and I'm pretty sure that's why I convert as well at the University of California Santa Cruz twenty-seven-year-old Ben Novack is one of about a dozen scientists worldwide working in the new field of the extinction there school to do something that may sound like science fiction bring back species that have disappeared from the planet Novak is working 2D extinct the passenger pigeon among the world's 300 pigeons and doves eat food out for being elegant fast in the most abundant bird in the world when I first discovered the passenger pigeon in a bookstore I was a naive Junior High student I fell in love with the bird just from just from seeing it the blue the red the fantail in those Swift wings in the early eighteen hundreds that were 5 billion these birds just in the United States put in the span of about 50 years they go extinct is amazing beautiful bird that is falling in love with is extinct so I can't see them and there's this absolute scale to its population that I can't even wrap my head around it that sealed the deal for me I was a passenger pigeon enthusiasts and I will be until the day I die pillar 20 years ago the concept of recreating an extinct organisms complete science fiction we now have the building blocks of science to do this there are no no human desire to come face-to-face with long gone animals isn't new Robert Burke that the T-Rex was a rogue who would have been in this young at the earliest opportunity I know I can prove otherwise in the 1993 Blockbuster Jurassic Park and people lost world scientist Venture onto a tropical island to get a close-up look at clone dinosaurs the movies for trade them with ripping realism but 65 million years after they're extinct there's no chance they're coming back in Jurassic Park is a fantasy and always will be dinosaurs are way too old to think that we're going to be able to recover genetic material because DNA only lasts about 100,000 years scientists are now focusing on species that disappeared within that time frame and they're trying different approaches to bring them back scientist have already revived one extinct animal the last of a type of mountain goat was cloned in Spain in 2003 from a skin sample taken while she was still alive for clone only lived a few minutes and researchers repeated their attempts in 2014 Australian scientists are attempting to clone a unique frog that gave birth through its mouth and the Tasmanian tiger a carnivore that carries its young in a pouch and in the Netherlands researchers are breeding cattle to close you resemble the oryx the ancestors of all modern Cows and Bulls and then there is groups like us at revive and restore thinking about bringing back the passenger pigeon and that's going to be kind of a newt we're actually going to be using genome engineering the nonprofit groups idea used to take its closest living relative the band-tailed pigeon and genetically engineer it into a passenger pigeon we have four in the collection these are the two that look the best of the ones that we've got and we got a male and a female would be appropriate I had no idea that Oakland had excited to learn about pigeons that I hadn't heard about yet because I want to see them all. That's the goal today makes number 338 and number 339 that I have seen you have this View footlong Dove shaped tail these very Swift Wings very pointed very narrow for Speed in the eighteen hundreds people are reporting them to maybe I've been flying around 60 miles per hour not to be confused with domesticated carrier pigeon passenger pigeons were wild birds that migrated through the eastern and Central US and Canada they traveled by the million swallowing acorns whole destroying trees under their weight naturalist John James Audubon once wrote that their flocks obscured the sun like an eclipse that flies in flocks like the passenger pigeon used to Dory say sometimes I'll be two miles wide 556 Mi long did these giant flocks of birds so dense that with a single shot you can take down dozens of them or you can lower them into an error and met them Ship by the trainloads to feed hungry cities the passenger pigeon went extinct in the wild in the late eighteen hundreds if you birds in captivity slowly died out until only one named Martha was left at the Cincinnati Zoo her death in 1914 meant the end of the passenger pigeon that a huge population could just go to zero that was the beginning of taking Extinction seriously answer to go back to that original mistake time and try to undo it there might be some redemption in that bran has been calling the Public's attention to the environment since the 1960s catalog taught a generation everything from growing food to building their own wind turbines and became part of What's called the modern environmental movement which has now become a bit acquainted in my humble opinion because it did not Embrace technology I think the way the truth of especially biotechnology extinct species extinct species back who is that comedian Trevon attitude we're lost unless we realize it we're just a part of this intricate web and speed we ought to bring species back if they can help maintain edweb not because it makes us feel better and sleep better at night the Enterprise of Reviving disappeared species is driven at least in part by the increasing Extinction rate that scientist have observed in the past 500 years this case contains some the most valuable specimens on a collection there actually only two keys in his case I have one in the collection manager has the other hear the Carolina parakeets and they were quite common I'm in the 1801 only driven extinct largely by hunting on cuz they did affect farmers and crops because they were gregarious like many parrots are they would shoot one the others would continue to flock around that one Fallen brother FMA can pick off the other ones this one is the moho the kings in Hawaii would use this little bit of yellow in their capes these are ivory-billed woodpeckers and they were in the news a lot recently because there was a population believed to have been Big Woods of Arkansas native hope that some feathers that they had found in the field might have come from ivory-billed woodpeckers Unfortunately they all turned out to be other species when a species goes extinct at the end those jeans were gone that job in the ecosystem is gone that Niche disappears so there's nothing left to serve that purpose humans are the reason why species are going extinct at a higher rate human population sizes are so big that we're having a huge impact destroying habitats and converting habitats from its agriculture two cities the other things that we used climate change is making things worse by turning the oceans inhospitable to coral reefs for example some scientists estimate that have temperatures can I need to climb they could contribute to The Disappearance of half the world's species to the extent that we want to preserve anything that we love you have to work at that and if the extinction is a part of that I think it's a people to have in your toolbox if you've got some ecosystem that we know it's collapsing because we've lost some key ecosystem component and we can be extinct it why wouldn't we do that I would put my emphasis on maintaining what we have in preventing further extinctions if we have these Technologies in these Technologies can be brought to beer to help preserve what is already here where I would put my resources hey wrote us a very endearing letter that just said you know since the timer 13 I've been wanting to do exactly this you know and certainly looked at each other and said how can we not hire this guy has not published yet Ryan feeling and Stewart brand non-profit revive and restore in Sausalito California he's paying for NovoLog to work at the University of California Santa Cruz to bring back the passenger pigeon one and it has come up from a potential funder who actually talked to Stuart 9 said you know if we were to put in a six-figure number you know how could it help fast-track what you're doing is 100000 to 4 us easily do more than one comparative genomics study for the money tends to be coming in is not from traditional conservation do North bug from people in high-tech they like being on cutting edges and this is one feeling who is married to Brand knows about being on The Cutting Edge she helped Pioneer personal genetic testing over the web with her company DNA direct which she sold in 2010 and seeing the power of Technologies in human health you wouldn't want to have cancer today and not know that your tumor has been sequenced I believe that that will happen exactly what conservation feeling and brand have listed. church one of the pioneers of genome editing is our ability to read ancient DNA and a second ability to change the genomes of birds and mammals to bring back the passenger pigeon scientist will genetically engineer its closest relative which turned out to be a pigeon from the West Coast in Riverside California sell Alvarez he is one of the few breeders in the country who raises the band-tailed pigeon to turn it into a passenger pigeon researchers will have to make it Square tail and its wings more aerodynamic the band under its tail would be replaced with dots on the male's the chest would become red in the wings blue the process begins with the sequencing of the band-tailed pigeons G Alder has contributed a blood sample from one of his pigeons to do all the testing from rename that Sally Ryan and Stuart they both came up with that name because of my name being sad 1 Sally's genome has been sequenced Novak will compare it to the passenger pigeons genome sequences DNA from specimens stored at museums like the telephone Academy of Sciences you can take a little tiny snippet of the stride toe skin and we find it that DNA is pretty easy to get out of there it's very degraded but it's in better shape than from the other parts of the body researchers have plenty of passenger pigeon DNA. the face a challenge DNA from a dead animal is broken into many tiny pieces and needs to be painstakingly assembled like a puzzle what would be really helpful would be if we were to have the box that goes with that puzzle with the picture on it that we could use to try to keep these little pieces together we're working with an extinct species we don't have that instead we can figure out what that part. She look like the band tail pigeon and we're going to use that to try to piece together these tiny little broken fragments and come up with the passenger pigeon the passenger pigeon jeans that aren't present in the band tailed pigeons Geno could turn out to be what gives the extinct heard it's Unique traits its redbreast words with wings and long tail what scientists figure out what those jeans are Bill build them in the lab using chemical compound then they plan to insert passenger pigeon jeans into band-tailed pigeon sells editing technology blackbird fly scissors to cut and splice with unprecedented accuracy and Annie's you are experienced with the editing Technologies as they work on every organism with tried from Plants to fungi and so forth cells into band-tailed pigeon eggs I just right we'll get band-tailed pigeons that carry the sperm and the eggs of passenger pigeons that when you take a male and a female breathing together they lay an egg and how adages a passenger pigeon the chick would need a name and field Vision into a passenger pigeon and the answer is we don't know yet really know until you try it do birds would join other types of birds that have been successfully bred in captivity some of the strategies might seem far-fetched humans have served as surrogate parents for the cat for your condor and they take to be a air to help whooping cranes migrate with the passenger pigeon one goal would be to teach the birds to stick together so they won't go off and join flocks of other pigeons we can take White Rock pigeons trained them to fly from one area to another to be our adult flock of birds and then we could dye their feathers blue on the back on the breasts make them look like passenger pigeons so that our baby passenger pigeons see a flock of passenger pigeons going from one area to another has never been answered we don't know anything about whether or not passenger pigeon needs to exist in huge numbers in order to survive at all to anyone who really want to bring the passenger pigeon back to life I say that knowing whether or not they're going to need to bring back a bill the film is probably a pretty good question Shapiro in Nova Corps doing genetic studies to clarify whether or not passenger pigeons can only survive in huge blocks this will help determine if actually enough Forest to support them in the last 100 years talking with an m different conservationists they really do believe that there is habitat there if there is enough forest for the passenger pigeon the revived bird could end up in conflict with humans once again especially if it were listed under the endangered Species Act if it's an endangered species then all of a sudden all of the forest habitat where it goes into will be off-limits to hunting and hiking and biking and I'm not sure that that would be something that was well beach by segments of the population will the people in the east coast they willing to put up with thousands of pigeons defecating all over everything what is 20 years before we'll see them in the in the wild again I'd like to see that happen in 15 but we also have to allow the time people have to want this pigeon back but skepticism to be coming from all Corners even from within the team working within nobach though his boss at the university is researching why passenger pigeons became so abundant she doesn't think it's a good idea to bring them back why the passenger pick why do you want to bring this bird back and not something else not something that is less annoying always a billion birds flying overhead a misconception send about Annoying that we know that they existed in the billions the new population doesn't necessarily have to be a huge population that can be a smaller population of birds living a lot more like bandtail pigeons and serving their ecological role in the east not something that is going to feel roll for example that might help other species at like the mammoth for example there's a place where you could put them in in the Arctic where they might actually help to reinvigorate the environment passenger pigeon would not fill in this has been vacated it would make itself of nuisance so I'm unconvinced the types of trees that become successful and that's the all that I see the passenger pigeon coming back to play help restore the forest by spreading seeds ground scientist had even bigger plans for the woolly mammoth George Church is engineering LLC cells with jeans that would give them thick fur and a fatty layer his hope is that these new Manas could help keep the Arctic from Milton scientists believe that grazing by herbivores like Mammoth Springs in the grass that grew on top the permafrost and protected it from the Sun around the grass that stabilize the ice which contains more carbon in it as in global warming carbon then all the rain for put together * 2 how many woolly mammoths which you have to have horsing across Siberia Siberia is not exactly a small place you know to have that kind of global impact to keep the permafrost from melting scientists skeptical of the extinction believe that any technology developed to bring back extinct species could be useful to help endangered species this technology tremendously useful in conservation biology for example to re-engineer Lost diversity in two populations that have recently become very very small and are on the verge of Extinction the northern white rhinoceros at the sea Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido California are so endangered that they risk one day being only on the park sign right now she kind of prefers Alfalfa we usually don't feed this two are white rhinos but she's Siri Patrick and there's no need for her not to have her favorite food and Angie are two of only seven Northern white rhinos left in the world poached for their horns the rhinos are believed to have disappeared wild around 2006 the last stronghold for the northern White Rhino and its natural habitat was in Grand Bend National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo the caretakers the Rangers the people who were protecting been studying it were threatened and told to leave at40 the parks to rhinos have ended their baby-making years and it's also unlikely that the other five will reproduce either without some extraordinary intervention Northern white rhinos are doomed those Extraordinary Measures begin with Rhino cells stored at -2 at the San Diego Zoo's Frozen Zoo scientists have selected cells from 12 Northern white rhinos and would like to use them to increase the population's size and genetic diversity using stem-cell techniques scientists could produce Rhino sperm and eggs they've been join them through in vitro fertilization to create Rhino embryos the plan would call for a close relative southern white rhinos to be the surrogate mothers those rhinos are themselves also endangered each of these steps has been accomplished in other species and nobody has tried to do this with the rhinos and if nobody tries for sure they will become extinct created in the 1970s for General search purposes the Frozen Zoo now holds the cells of 1000 different species one of them Hawaiian bird has already gone extinct and a handful more or on the brink with the right Technologies there Ford sells could One Day become a Lifeline the wonders of Life are encoded in the DNA of the vials from Arabian oryx and pygmy hippopotamus has and Bighorn that's just one of the over hundred boxes in here I show this to Young scientists who come and visit and want to know what a scientist working on genetics of endangered species. Play Someday you may be able to work on these samples because we taken care of them support for KQED science is provided by the National Science Foundation the foulest family fund the Mary van Voorhees fund the SD Bechtel Jr Foundation the David beagle Foundation the Dirk and Charlene kabcenell Foundation the Valdez Family Foundation the Wyncote foundation and the Amgen Foundation support is also provided by the members of KQED

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