Posted on 09/13/2022 8:56:55 AM PDT by Red Badger
See the movie Derzu Uzala (1975) for reference.
Siberia is 5.1 million square miles in size, just a bit smaller than Antarctica. And about as hospitable. So if you plan to visit, to poach some mammoth ivory, be sure to wear warm hiking boots. Not many roads, either.
I have no desire to restore dinosaurs, they are very resilient and survived a LONG time. Also no large predators.
On the other hand, Dodo Birds, Mammoths, Passenger Pidgeons, come to mind. Dodos lived on unpopulated islands and were killed by hungry sailors. They could be reestablished on a unpopulated island. Mammoths in Siberia, or perhaps on a large Arctic island where the last mammoths died only 8,000 years ago (more isolated and safer). The PPs were a major source of food to our early US settlers. Because they seem to only breed in large flocks, when they became too few from overhunting they died out, Establishing a reproducing flock (perhaps 500 individuals) would be quite difficult. Also since they are migratory, legal jurisdictions and protection would be more difficult even if such numbers could be regenerated. I suspect we will get to Mars sooner.
I just want a Dodo bird.
Me too. Dodos were like the Helen Thomases of birds. My dodo could scare away burglars and porch pirates while I’m off riding my cute baby wooly mammoth to the grocery store.
I’m thinking those curly mammoth tusks would come in handy for lots of things other than hanging my grocery bags from them, too. Like coiling the water hose and stuff.
Yeah, bringing back the dodo would be pretty cool. Mammoths, too.
I remember reading early settlers’ accounts of passenger pigeon migrations. They said the sky was darkened by them for a couple of days as the huge numbers of them flew overhead. It must have been quite the sight, and I was sad they had gone extinct. The settlers had a few things to say about their droppings, too, but I’ll leave it at that.
The Passenger Pigeon roosted in geographically limited areas for their mating season, and the hunters just showed up for it and gunned them down, selling the carcasses for use as squab in east coast hotels and other restaurants. Regardless, it was a d***ed pigeon.
There’s a long shot at reviving a genetically narrow version of it, from old feather pillows and museum type specimens, but again, it was a d***ed pigeon.
There’s at least two active programs to revive the full-sized mammoths. Pygmy mammoths were still around in very small numbers (the constraint was the food supply) a mere 2000 years ago.
I’d like to see the revival of the auroch, but as in all these examples, I can live without it.
BTW, note that this is a TEDx talk, given by a lawyer, not a scientist.
We’re already doing it with simpler organisms... COVID-19 & the Spanish Influenza. And we’ve just been thru a worst case scenario with the former.
The Extinctions
Passenger Pigeons: Stewards of the Hardwood Forests
https://www.theextinctions.com/articles-1/passenger-pigeons-stewards-of-the-hardwood-forests
Passsenger Pigeons would probably be the most useful deextinction as they could be a major low cost food source. In fact when they existed in swarms, indentured servants sometimes had contract saying they could only be fed PP a certain number of days a week. Unfortunately breeding the swarm size that would allow mating behavior would not be easy.
Regarding Covid and Spanish Flu, God help us if Spanish Flu gets loose. It killed 50 million people in 2 years. I think Covid has only killed about 6 million, and that is with a world population multi billions of people more these days. Of course we have more experience with flu vaccine, so might get one more quickly, but distribution would be much harder as the SF spread really fast, I could imaging as many as 200 million dead in a year or two. Meanwhile if they don’t get on top of Monkey Pox with serious contact tracing, that could also become endemic, and it should not as it spreads less easily.
The five years of “Spanish Lady” influenza (this is from the Gina Kolata book) shows that the 1916 season saw the start of it, 1918 was the peak, and the trailing years were ‘19 and ‘20. There was something peculiar about that particular strain, as those who were about to die hemorrhaged in their lungs.
Another Kolata find, those who had survived the worst flu strain of the 1890s already had immunity from the Spanish Lady, never even got the sniffles.
The reason so much effort is put into annual innoc’s for flu is to keep the mortality down. In the US, over the ten years from 2010 to 2020, the lowest was in 2011-2012 (12,000) and the worst two (2014-15, 2017-18) around 50,000 fatalities. Average is somewhere around 30,000 a year in the US, and worldwide estimates range from 294,000-518,000.
I’ll go way out on a limb here and suggest that the US, with perhaps 5 percent of the world’s population, has a much better system of dealing with influenza than most of the world, so that these world figures suffer from severe underreporting. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that A) annual worldwide flu fatalities are north of a million, or B) that geography, jet stream, human travel etc tend to disproportionately funnel the bug into North America from its Chinese reservoir/homeland.
Ebola (the bad outbreak in West Africa happened 2013/4–2016, when the Kenyan-born muzzie was in office), and (it sez here) less than a dozen in the US were treated for it, and two died. Worldwide, something like 11K died, mostly in western Africa.
They only called it the "Spanish Flu", because as a neutral during WWI, Spain was one of the few countries that didn't censor reports of cases in their country, thus the only reports people heard about were the cases in Spain. There is speculation that there were so many cases in Germany, it was a factor in them losing the war.
The reason Germany/Austria-Hungary lost was that the US entered the war. Obviously the flu would have impacted all combatants. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that the 1916/1917 hit the Russians as well, and helped push that regime off the cliff and out of the war.
Here’s a group trying to recreate the Passenger Pigeon:
https://reviverestore.org/about-the-passenger-pigeon/
1918 Spanish Flu has been reconstructed:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm
IIRC “Mother Abigail” who once posted here said that cytokine storms were a factor in the lethality of that flu. Hybrid human-animal flus can provoke cytokine storms and 1918 was an H1N1 virus mixed with avian flu.
Cytokine storms may also have played a role in the lethality of the original Covid strain. It can cause multiple organ failure and death.
“Meanwhile if they don’t get on top of Monkey Pox with serious contact tracing, that could also become endemic, and it should not as it spreads less easily.”
Smallpox vaccines are supposedly effective against Monkey Pox. Unless we quit routinely vaxxing for smallpox there shouldn’t be a lot of risk in this country.
There’s been the theory that the Spanish Flu originated in western Kansas.
More recent is the theory that Chinese laborers brought it from China to Canada. Canada entered the war long before we did and they had a labor shortage that had them importing Chinese help.
I blame Coronado.
We stopped vaccinating for smallpox in 1972. It was declared to be eradicated from the Earth in 1980, IIRC.
The first known human monkeypox cases showed up in Africa in the 1970s, and at first occurred mainly in small children. As the the children who had never been vaccinated aged up, monkeypox began to be seen in older children, then teens, then adults.
I’m not all that worried about monkeypox becoming a big thing outside the gay population. It’s not all that easy to catch.
Re your #55, I’ve read about the Kansas theory, but didn’t know about the Canada one. It actually makes more sense. Thanks for cluing me in!
Wonderful article. Long read, but worth it! Thank you :)
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