CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) – Scientists have cloned America’s first endangered species, a black-footed ferret copied from the genes of an animal that died more than 30 years ago.
The sneaky predator named Elizabeth Ann, born December 10 and announced Thursday, is cute as a button. But beware – unlike the tame ferret foster mom who carried her into the world, she’s wild at heart.
“You may have handled a black-footed ferret kit and then the next day they try to take your finger off,” said Pete Gober, coordinator for black-foot ferret recovery for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Thursday. “She holds her own.”
Elizabeth Ann was born and raised in a Fish and Wildlife Service black-footed ferret breeding facility in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is a genetic copy of a ferret named Willa who died in 1988 whose remains were frozen in the early days of DNA technology.
Cloning could eventually return extinct species such as the passenger pigeon. For now, the technique holds great promise for helping endangered species, including a Mongolian wild horse that was cloned and born at a facility in Texas last summer.
“Biotechnology and genomic data can really make a difference in practice with conservation efforts,” said Ben Novak, chief scientist at Revive & Restore, a biotechnology-focused nonprofit that coordinated the cloning of ferrets and horses.
Black-footed ferrets are a type of weasel that can be easily identified by dark eye markings that resemble a mugger’s mask. Charismatic and nocturnal, they feed exclusively on prairie dogs while living amid the rodents’ sometimes expansive burrow colonies.
Even before cloning, black-footed ferrets were a conservation success story. They were thought to be extinct – victims of habitat loss when ranchers shot and poisoned prairie dog colonies that made pastures less suitable for livestock – until a farm dog named Shep brought a dead person home to Wyoming in 1981.
Scientists collected the remaining population for a captive breeding program that has released thousands of ferrets since the 1990s from dozens of locations in the western US, Canada, and Mexico.
Lack of genetic diversity prevents persistent risk. All ferrets reintroduced to date are the descendants of only seven closely related animals – genetic similarity that makes today’s ferrets potentially susceptible to intestinal parasites and diseases such as sylvatic plague.
Willa could have passed on her genes in the usual way, too, but a male born out of her named Cody “didn’t do his job,” and her lineage died out, Gober said.
When Willa died, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department sent her tissues to a “frozen zoo” run by San Diego Zoo Global, which preserves cells from more than 1,100 species and subspecies around the world. Ultimately, scientists can modify those genes to help cloned animals survive.
“With these cloning techniques you can basically freeze time and regenerate those cells,” said Gober. “We are a long way from tinkering with the genome to confer some genetic resistance, but that is a possibility in the future.”
Cloning creates a new plant or animal by copying the genes from an existing animal. Texas-based Viagen, a company that clones cats for $ 35,000 and dogs for $ 50,000, has cloned a Przewalski horse, a wild Mongolian horse species born last summer.
As with the black-footed ferret, the roughly 2,000 surviving Przewalski horses are descendants of just a dozen animals.
Viagen has also cloned Willa through coordination by Revive & Restore, a conservation organization focused on biotechnology. In addition to cloning, the nonprofit in Sausalito, California, is promoting genetic research on endangered life forms ranging from starfish to jaguars.
“How can we actually apply some of that scientific advancement for conservation? Because conservation needs more tools in the toolbox. That’s our whole motivation. Cloning is just one of the tools, ”said Ryan Phelan, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Revive & Restore.
Elizabeth Ann was born to a domestic ferret that did not endanger a rare black-footed ferret. Two unrelated domestic ferrets were also born by Caesarean section; a second clone did not survive.
Elizabeth Ann and future clones of Willa will form a new line of black-footed ferrets that will remain in Fort Collins for study. There are currently no plans to release them into the wild, Gober said.
Novak, the chief scientist at Revive & Restore, calls himself the group’s “passenger pigeon man” for his work of once bringing back the once common bird that has been extinct for over a century. Bird cloning is considered much more challenging than mammals because of their eggs, but the group’s projects even include trying to retrieve a woolly mammoth, a creature that has been extinct for thousands of years.
The seven-year attempt to clone a black-footed ferret was much less theoretical, he said, showing how biotechnology can now help in conservation. In December, Novak charged a motor home and drove his family to Fort Collins to see the results firsthand.
“I absolutely had to see our beautiful clone in person,” said Novak. “There is simply nothing more incredible than that.”
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