Parasites and de-extinction

[We’re still taking a break from the “how to become a successful parasite ecologist” post series. More on that in a few weeks!]

Sometime during my undergraduate education, I was required to prepare for and participate in a class debate exercise regarding whether we should bring animals like the woolly mammoth back from extinction. In the years since, I haven’t kept up with that literature at all, so I was quite surprised to read this opening line in a recent paper: “De-extinction is rapidly transitioning from scientific aspiration to inevitability.” Wow!

But that wasn’t even the most exciting part of the paper. Wood et al. (2017) went on to point out that to successfully ‘resurrect’ extinct species, we would need to ensure that the appropriate abiotic and biotic environments exist to sustain those resurrected species. You know what that means, don’t you? Parasites. If we’re going to resurrect extinct species, we need to give them parasites.

Here’s a quote from the paper. I hope it makes you ponder things… I certainly did.

“Would it be possible to genetically manufacture a parasite fauna and microbiota to suit the resurrected species, perhaps using palaeoecological data as a guide? Or would a mixture of extant parasites and microbiota, from species with a similar ecological niche, be sufficient? What implications would there be of a failure to adequately reconstruct these obligate microbiotic communities for the resurrected species and the ecosystem within which it is to be embedded?”

Reference:

Wood, J. R., Perry, G. L. W. and Wilmshurst, J. M. 2017. Using palaeoecology to determine baseline ecological requirements and interaction networks for de-extinction candidate species. Funct Ecol, 31: 1012–1020. doi:10.1111/1365-2435.12773