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Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

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Re: Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

#33
post #5

I saw Ben Novak talk at the Interval last year. He mentioned that a few animals have been resurrected in a slightly different way already. Eg. the Red Factor Canary was resurrected by breeding a Domestic Canary and a Red Siskin. Apparently the offspring had enough geno/phenotypic resemblance to the original Red Factor Canary that this newly created lineage was given that original name.

In George Church's book Regenesis, he recounts the interesting story of resurrecting the Pyrenean Ibex by somatic cell nuclear transfer and surrogate pregnancy in a closely related species. The source article is a great read [0].

The animal that resulted died of lung complications shortly after birth, but apparently veterinarians indicated that these complications were totally within the norm of ibex ontogeny, and probably not a failing of the underlying cell biology.

So, for just a few minutes, an extinct species was brought back to life.

[0] -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19167744

Re: Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

#34

I'll leave this here. https://flypigeon.co

Good ol' RFC 1149. I heard that some companies would use it as a bozo detector when accepting bids for network hardware. You'd list it as one of the protocols you expect the switches to be able to handle and look more carefully at anyone who said "yeah we support all of that" because they weren't your pal, buddy.

One vendor on one of these bids (maybe Cisco? I can't recall) answered back that while they don't currently support carrier pigeon they are considering it for a future feature enhancement.

Re: Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

#35
post #33
post #5

I saw Ben Novak talk at the Interval last year. He mentioned that a few animals have been resurrected in a slightly different way already. Eg. the Red Factor Canary was resurrected by breeding a Domestic Canary and a Red Siskin. Apparently the offspring had enough geno/phenotypic resemblance to the original Red Factor Canary that this newly created lineage was given that original name.

In George Church's book Regenesis, he recounts the interesting story of resurrecting the Pyrenean Ibex by somatic cell nuclear transfer and surrogate pregnancy in a closely related species. The source article is a great read [0]. The animal that resulted died of lung complications shortly after birth, but apparently veterinarians indicated that these complications were totally within the norm of ibex ontogeny, and pr…

The only species to go extinct twice.

Re: Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

#36
post #3

The problem with the Passenger Pigeon is that it was very common everywhere, and its behavior came to rely on this fact. An individual will leave its flock and just assume it can find a new flock. Once the population level dropped below a critical threshold, it was doomed. The Rusty Blackbird has much the same problem, and the fear is that it may have now dropped below its threshold.

> The problem with the Passenger Pigeon is that it was very common everywhere, and its behavior came to rely on this fact. An individual will leave its flock and just assume it can find a new flock. Once the population level dropped below a critical threshold, it was doomed.

An interesting thought exercise is to presume this is written about the Homo Sapiens at some point in the distant future by a neutral 3rd party observer.

Re: Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

#37
post #35
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In George Church's book Regenesis, he recounts the interesting story of resurrecting the Pyrenean Ibex by somatic cell nuclear transfer and surrogate pregnancy in a closely related species. The source article is a great read [0]. The animal that resulted died of lung complications shortly after birth, but apparently veterinarians indicated that these complications were totally within the norm of ibex ontogeny, and pr…

The only species to go extinct twice.

In Spain, obviously. After years of "I will not permit to add new blood with hybrids with wild goat, because is a unique trophy that nobody will have except us".

Even today the idea of add new blood to the remaining (and very inbreed) populations of wild goats is often mission imposible blocked by hunter's lobbies.

Re: Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

#39
post #20

Can we not resurrect this absurd topic? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we can harvest in terms of reducing our damage to existing species.

Perhaps it's overdiscussed here, but there are lots of important environmental lessons that are worth reflecting on.

I like the idea that we can really mess things up and then use technology to "undo" the damage. Pay it forward if you will. Maybe it could increase the technological velocity of the human race just enough to get us out of this mess.

Re: Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

#40
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understandable perspective. Actually I did, I just felt the clickbait title and reality outside of what-if-science was more interesting.

You not knowing what a word means doesn't take it clickbait

Thanks for your amazing contribution to the discussion.
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