> I had no idea there were lions in Alaska and Canada before.
There were way more large mammals everywhere in the world around that time. Somehow all these species disappeared as soon as humans showed up on the scene, strangely enough...
There are still lions in the Americas today, just most people don't think of them[1][2][3] as such despite being nearly as large as their African counterparts. Same subfamily as cheetahs[4].
Heh, true. A 200lb adult Cougar that can jump _40ft_ or 18ft up is 'perspective enhancing' enough. The first thing you notice is it's paws. Common in southern Arizona, but it's rare to see one and there are no recorded fatal attacks (here).
I have never been comfortable with the concept of reintroducing a species that we haven't directly observed. We can't predict the impact one may have on its environment or disruption to the food chain.
Reintroducing a species which we are familiar with, say after over hunting by poachers, is more likely to produce the expected results without complications because we have prior knowledge of that species role in nature.
Well we don't have to reintroduce them. We can just keep them in zoos or something. Or at least sterilize them at first. Chances are, they died off because they got out-competed anyway.
There's something perverse about the idea of reanimating a species essentially for our own enjoyment (edification, whatever you want to call it) after it died out through natural processes.
Natural processes can include earthquakes, volcanoes, viruses. Its often random. Plenty of reason to think these species have something to offer in the present day.
I think of it like publishing an old book, or seeing an old movie. It is being a good steward of a legacy in a sense.
Also, there are a lot of species that went extinct because they encountered a predator they couldn't deal with - people. Is that a "natural process" just because it happened before recorded history?
The leading candidate for this extinction was the introduction of humans equipped with bows and arrows into its environment through the Bering land bridge.
The African versions of big species were able to co-evolve along with humans as we developed spears, fire, etc. The American ones did not. This is why the American versions of everything from horses to cheetahs disappeared.
Hum, nope, ecosystem restauration is not a perverse or silly goal. Species have coevolved for millions of years to make the best, stronger and more resilient ecosystem possible.
But then by restoring the ecosystem to be similar to your conception of a prior state aren't you preventing the continued maturation of that ecosystem, effectively stopping the system from evolving further?
Not. First of all is not our "conception" of a previous state. We know that Europe had a big mammal fauna in the past and that this fauna was erradicated.
Second, We are restoring the coevolution and making the system stronger in fact. A well managed predator benefit to thousands, maybe hundreds of species. Entire communities of insects and fungi need the temporary ecosystems created by predators. Preys benefit also by mean of disease control.
I used the word conception because the view of a past ecosystem is always going to be missing details. Predator prey interactions are chaotic in simplified systems. If there's an insect that affected a plant then herbivorous prey of a mammalian predator can be impacted in ways that can alter the entire system causing an imbalance that has not been allowed for. It is a conception because it is not the previous state you're returning to. For example human occupation levels of some regions are reduced by malaria and bilharzia.
Attempts to introduce species that we thought we understood well have turned decidedly sour in the past, introducing species we know relatively nothing about is unlikely to go well.
Attempts to introduce species have turned decidedly sour in the past... if introducted in ecosystems where they do not belong. Reintroducting a locally extinct species is a different case.
Big felines are very well known animals. Present in all zoos of the world and reproducted in captivity since many years ago. There are entire books published about big feline surgery for example.
It is a conception because it is not the previous state you're returning to.
This is a false problem. The goal is not to achieve a theorical ideal previous state, is to restaurate a missing node to be able to reach a range of valid stable states. Is the same difference as "to reconnect a route bombed in 1940 to drive from a to b" or "to try to frozen the area in 1940". Nobody is talking about to living in caves again and working three hours each day.
If there's an insect that affected a plant... causing an imbalance that has not been allowed for.
All imbalances are "allowed" in fact, there is not a nature police, but your imbalance will never occur. Hervibores will just start eating other species of plants or migrate and quit the area followed by predators until the plant species recover. Mature ecosystems are buffered and can deal with known changes.
don't think anyone would reintroduce a species, unless of course you would fully understand the impact it would have. there would also be interesting challenges around diversity and adapting to the environment.
I could see bringing back a few specimens to life via cloning and whatnot - if only for being able to experience something from the past that we did not get to see.
Remember, these are the creatures that lost. They were out-competed in their day. Also, their genes are likely still present today in some cousin species.
Could be- Or they could have been a good investment for the ratio of effort to food gained. In the case of the cave bear it may have been a case of killing of creatures that could be predators when humans were not in a pack and competed for the same shelter sources.
This may not be realistic, without even considering the angle of "can we solve the challenges involved in recreating species from some DNA samples?" The earth has changed in ways that can make prior organisms simply unsuited to life on earth, similar to how fish are not suited to surviving out of water. Gill fish simply cannot breathe out of water, even aside from mobility issues.
So, as one example, the earth has substantially less oxygen than it did millions of years ago. This means giant dragonflies cannot breathe in our current atmosphere. You would need to put them in a special chamber that recreates their niche, possibly without knowing what parameters are critical to their survival.
The species for which revival is technologically plausible are those with well-preserved frozen specimens, mainly pleistocene (mega)fauna like mammoths and the lions presented here. They lived at most a few tens of thousands of years ago, which is geologically barely worth mentioning, and the atmospheric composition hasn't changed much since then, or not in ways relevant to animals.
Not terribly relevant, but in A Song of Ice and Fire, cave lions have been extinct for hundred's of years as well. Given George R. R. Martin's uncanny ability to predict the future, this isn't that surprising of a find. http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lion
If they made it until there, I wonder what stopped them from going down south...