Planet Earth

So lately I've been infatuated with BBC's miniseries, Planet Earth. If you haven't seen it, you are missing out. It is simply the greatest nature documentary ever made. HD-quality shots of absolutely stunning landscapes and exceedingly rare animals and their behavior. And make sure to get the original British version narrated by David Attenborough; the Discovery Channel adapted it for U.S. audiences and chose Sigourney Weaver to narrate. Not that she was god awful, but she's no David Attenborough.

In any event, towards the end of the series, they discussed conservation efforts and endangered species. They interviewed some woman who is heading up an effort by American zoos to create a cryogenic library of animal DNA, the idea being that any extinct species could be kept alive in stasis and then simply repopulated later by cloning.

While that sounds cool and high-tech (the woman was clearly a huge technophile), that has to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Lets take the Amur leopard, one of the rarest (if not the rarest) large predator in the world, as an example. There are an estimated 30 Amur leopards in the wild. Yes, three zero, thirty. And only six of them are females. They all live in Russia in the Siberian wilderness, one of the harsher environments on earth. During the long winters, prey is very scarce. As a result, cubs stay with their mother for up to two years to learn the skills necessary to survive.

So lets say we clone one of these leopards at a zoo. Or even just have one thats bred in captivity through a normal mating between captive parents. And we let it wean for a couple years until it is grown enough to release into the wild. What will happen? Well, the first winter hits and it will die. No one has taught it the necessary skills to survive. It can sure run around a cage and attract oohs and aahs from schoolchildren with the best of them. But hunt and catch prey in the wild? Nope. Know to stay away from other predators like the Siberian tiger? No clue. Know to stay away from human poachers and hunters? When the heck did it learn that humans are dangerous when it was fed from a bottle by a human!

The other ridiculous thing this woman was saying (while getting all dreamy-eyed) was that in the future, if man colonizes Mars, we should populate Mars with cloned animals from Earth. I think she might not have been paying attention during ecology and evolution classes in school. If she ever took them at all. She might need to look up "eco-system" in the dictionary because she clearly doesn't understand the concept.

Lets face facts. Thirty animals is simply not enough to save a species. The Amur leopard, like so many others, will go extinct sooner rather than later. Habitat destruction and hunting will finish them. The only ones left will be in zoos. That is tragic; they are magnificent creatures. I'll leave the political side of this discussion for another day, but I think we can all agree that it's a sad thing. And don't fool yourself like the cloning woman. Technology is great. But it's no panacea.