The woolly mammoth is an ancient species of elephants that have been extinct for thousands of years. And for many years, people have been digging up remains of these animals in the ice, and they can find tusk up to an actual mammoth carcass. In 2013 a team from Russia had found almost an entire mammoth carcass that had blood oozing out of it. They had used carbon dating to find out that this woolly mammoth had lived 40,000 years ago. With this now in hand, the research had begun to try and bring back a woolly mammoth. And with this, they used the DNA in the CRISPR to isolate specific genes and then integrate it into the DNA of an Asian Elephant, which is the closest living relative to the wooly mammoth.
The video gives reasons that scientists want to bring back the woolly mammoth, and it’s to fights climate change. They say the reasoning for this would be is because locked in the deep permafrost of the artic there are greenhouse gases that escape when the ice melts, and it is so much that it would speed up climate change in the world. They say that mammoths can help with this because they are herbivores that can strip big fields of greenery. And since this happens, this allows grass, which is the fastest-growing plant to grow back more. Also, when it snows, and there is ice on the ground, the mammoths move the snow to get to the grass, which then exposes the ground to the cold air, which keeps the permafrost frozen. Also, if you do have a hybrid of mammoth and Asian elephants, then it could save the species. These are the advantage but let’s talk about the disadvantages.
I think one would be if you bring another animal into the environment, it could cause the extinction or movement of other plant-eaters. I say this because you are putting another animal in the environment, which can have severe problems for the ecosystem. Another reason is that there are no predators in today’s world that could take down a mammoth, which would move their food source to the other herbivores in the environment. This could cause a severe decrease in the number of species that are targeted by predators. These are disadvantages I think there would be if wooly mammoths were brought back to life.
I think that if it can be done for a woolly mammoth, then it definitely can be done for other animals. The reason I believe this is because the mammoth that was found was over 40,000 years old, and I think if we wanted to try with newer species that have gone extinct or are endangered, it could benefit the species as a whole. Just thinking about if this type of research and experiment is successful, we could do so many things for endangered to the point where they aren’t endangered.
References:
https://www.history.com/news/wooly-mammoth-resurrection-cloning-genesis