At the moment, scientists and researchers around the world are exploring the possibilities of cloning previously extinct animals. We’ve known that we can clone animals for decades (thank you very much Dolly the sheep), but whether or not we can bring a previously extinct species back to life, such as the wooly mammoth or the dodo, is a huge area of focus. But the humble Tasmanian tiger, which has been extinct for almost a century, could actually mean ecological benefits for Australia’s ecosystems if it were to be brought back and reintroduced.
That was, according to panellists at a SXSW Sydney talk titled ‘Dodo De-extinction and other lost animals’. Despite the name, a good portion of the talk tended to focus on the Tasmanian tiger, and at one point, an audience member questioned how the reintroduction of a species would work if the ecosystem had changed.
“There’s a [change] that has happened because we’ve lost the Tasmanian tiger in the first place,” according to Professor Andrew Pask from the University of Melbourne, the head of the Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research Laboratory (TIGRR, get it?) – ‘Thylacine’ being the scientific name of the Tasmanian tiger.
“A great example of this is the plight of the Tasmanian devil,” Pask explained. “They would have gone extinct in the wild if we hadn’t gone in as humans, isolated animals, and brought them back to mainland Australia, and protected them from death.”
Yes, we’re talking about both the Tasmanian devil and the Tasmanian tiger, but as Australian mammals, their histories are fairly intertwined – and in a lot of ways, they relied on each other in the wild.
“They’ve [Tasmanian devils] got this really terrible transmissible tumour disease,” Pask added. “They bite each other’s faces as part of their natural behaviour, this disease spreads really quickly through the population, and would have wiped them out completely. Now, when you’ve got your apex predator there, when you’ve got your Thylacine in place, their role is to pick off the weak and sick animals from the population. And so what they do is, they find those sick animals and they eat them. What’s happening at the moment is, with nobody to eat them, those animals actually survive in the population for a really long time until they starve to death because the tumour gets so big that they can’t eat. So they’re there for ages, and they spread that disease the entire time.
“And so, if you put the Tasmanian tiger back there, it would actually have prevented that disease from wiping out the Tasmanian Devil.”
It’s a bit strange to consider that by hunting and eating an animal, an apex predator like the Tasmanian tiger could have actually been doing a good thing for said animal’s species, but that’s just how ecosystems work, and it underscores just how fragile ecosystems can be. This is the case for other animals around the world too – remove one, impact all the others, in one way or another.
But there’s more to it than the Tasmanian devil, and today, with introduced wild cat populations hunting Australian wildlife, the ecosystem has changed – and perhaps the tiger could help.
“But one of the great things that they’ve shown with dingos is cats don’t like other predators around. So when you have another predator, the cats will disappear from a region. So, the Thylacine might actually be really fantastic in Tasmania in displacing cats outside of some of those really dense forest areas where we’ve got so many precious wildlife, that are only remaining in those pockets,” Pask said.
The idea of introducing, or reintroducing, a predator, only for it to simply hunt everything to extinction, is just not true, according to Colossal Biosciences co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, the other panellist, so if you were concerned about that, you can probably put your mind at rest.
“Predators actually expend a tremendous amount of energy trying to make a kill. So they go for the young, they go for the old, they go for the weak or sick, so fundamentally, they really almost they act like this cleaning layer to that messy layer of animals,” Lamm said.
Although, this is all very optimistic thinking; successful clones of the Tasmanian tiger are still years away, and even if cloning attempts were successful, researchers would need to plan meticulously to rewild (or in the case of clones, simply ‘wild’) these animals. You can’t just drop them back in the bush.
So for the sake of the larger ecosystem, I’m hoping that Australia’s apex predator does return. I just hope that, if they come back, humans stay the heck away from them.
Image: NFSA Films on YouTube