Back to life: Inside the ambitious project to resurrect Australia’s Tasmanian tiger | 101 East

Australia's thylacine or Tasmanian tiger is one of the most exotic and mysterious creatures to have roamed the planet it's an incredibly amazing beautiful marsupial that was brutally hunted by humans to Extinction now a world first this will be the the foundation of bringing the thylacine back a team of Australian scientists in collaboration with the U.S genetic engineering company are promising to resurrect it so possibly in the next five years I think that's a really good assassin their ultimate goal to return it to its native environment it was the only marsupial apex predator bringing that animal back would have incredible benefits from the ecosystem but the 15 million dollar project is already sparking Fierce debate so many species in Australia are threatened with Extinction to spend a lot of money doing something that is unfeasible is a missed opportunity if they succeed it will be a freak Show the animals will be so valuable there's no way you can let them free range 101 East travels to what was once thalassine Heartland and talks to the scientists and their critics about the ambitious project to bring it back to life [Music] Australia's spectacular Southern Isle was once home to the iconic thylacine having disappeared from Papua New Guinea and the mainland around 2000 years ago its fate in Tasmania was sealed by 19th century British colonists the Island's top predator shot to Extinction here they brought this European Predator hysteria everything with big teeth or Clauses non-grata it was a very Grim story biologist conservationist and arguably tasmania's leading thylacine expert Nick Mooney is blunt about his State's shameful past as the colony settled in and sheep arrived a conflict started immediately and one stage there was a claim that more sheep were killed every year than were actually sheep in Tasmania it was just classic tabloid rubbish so the Bounty was installed then that really was the death mule of the thylacine the thylacine population was wiped out within little more than a century after British colonists arrived the last ones believed to have died here at bemara zoo in Hobart in 1936. it's said to have died of neglect and exposure projectally just a couple of months after its death the thylacine was declared a protected species this famous footage of what's considered the second last surviving thylacine was taken soon after it was captured and brought to the zoo The Haunting images have made the animal an icon of human-induced extinctions but its Spirit lives on reports in recent weeks of revived hopes that a few of them still survive out there somewhere in the remote mountain and Forest areas but the sad fact is there's been thousands of citing reports I've met many people who firmly believe they've seen thylacines they're absolutely convincing whether they did or not it's a completely different issue almost 50 years after the last one was thought to have died Mooney led a year-long government search for the thylacine from this site a fellow Wildlife officer had reported seeing one here he was sleeping in these Land Cruiser woke up the flicked his Spotlight around and Bingo and he said there's this thylacine standing only three or four meters away from the vehicle so he had a chance to have a really good look at it several minutes he thought when the animal disappeared he had a look for Footprints but it was raining so nothing Mooney search also found nothing it was someone very experienced and so you've got no chance of a mistake there and so he was either right or he was lying he hasn't budged from your story one scrap since is it possible that they lived longer than people oh absolutely I think it's the most extraordinary bit of human arrogance to think we caught or killed the last one it's gone in existence of the rare creature that couldn't keep Pace with man knowing colloquially as a Tasmanian tiger or Tassie tiger for short the thylacine is indelibly etched in tasmania's identity adorning number plates and attracting tourists small towns trading on it in 1984 mole Craig was a site of the last official search for the thylacine but I'm on my way to meet some locals who say they've seen it since then and believe it's still out there with the head of a dog pouch of a kangaroo and Stripes of a tiger the magic of the mysterious marsupial is not lost on local Publican Doug Westbrook who took over the hotel 14 years ago the second week he was here we had a group of German Backpackers come through and they were really keen on the father said and I thought wow they come all the way from Germany to mole Creek and I thought there's something in there and like many of his patrons he says I believe I saw one my wife will say she definitely so I've had several encounters for Old-Timers like Joe and Lexi memories of the tiger haven't faded well my father used to snare back in the mountains and he used to often talk about the Tasmanian tigers I used to torment my mother I'd say so um there's a Tasmanian tiger on the road oh yes another one well this day I said there's a Tasmanian tiger on the road the closer I got the more I could see that it really was though he was wet you could still see the black stripes of him a younger Enthusiast says he's not only seen one let's just shot out of the Bush straight across the runs into that side but his video evidence we put the camera away and the tiger went in through daytime and a couple of nice slowly come back out there oh that's it yeah just there not this [Music] time but alas it's hard to see anything unfortunately we had the camera too high social media abounds with blurry photographs and videos posted by Tiger Hunters claiming to have captured images of The elusive creature while experts rebuff them the True Believers are not deterred yes I'd say it probably is still around so I just don't know everything and I'm certain things out [Music] this is an important job the Tassie Tiger has also Bewitched Hollywood and hard-headed media Barons America's Ted Turner offered a hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone who found one and Australia's Kerry Packer upped the ante to more than a million dollars all to no avail but now an American genetic engineering company is vowing to reverse the course of thylacine history the vast Mammoth step of the pleistocene era late 2021 colossal announced a project to attempt what humans have never done bring back an extinct animal woolly mammoths now long extinct once roamed these Northern landscapes in large herds raising more than 75 million dollars on the back of a proposal to resurrect The Woolly Mammoth by editing the Genome of an Asian elephant to create its giant furry relative breakthrough genetic engineering technologies have made it possible to read edit and even write genomes colossal the company's catchphrase restoring the past for a better future is now being used to promote the de-extinction of Australia's thylacine colossal's founder and CEO Ben Lam is streaming in from Dallas Texas the dial scene was actually eradicated a hundred percent by humankind and it served a major purpose in its ecosystem so uh it's kind of this uh perfect project where we can you know undo what was done from the past huge huge news coming out of Australia today with the help of social media influences colossal are planning to de-extinct the thylacine to learn more go to colossal.com colossal secured more than 10 million dollars its investors include a movie Megastar media celebrities private conservation companies and U.S intelligence agency the CIA I think that you know the federal government you know wants to understand what the capabilities are around these Technologies where do we need to put boundaries around these Technologies and then how can these Technologies really help the world right to really understand this ambitious project you need to meet this man Andrew pask a professor in the bioscience department at Australia's University of Melbourne who's been studying thylacine development for 20 years he leads a team of scientists collaborating with colossal I think there is nothing that approaches the the incredibleness of the Tasmanian tiger it was the only marsupial apex predator that has lived into modern times and so I got really fascinated in trying to figure out you know this is tragically lost this species but quite recently and could we use Museum specimens to unlock more about the biology of this incredible animal we know that DNA breaks down over time so for example there is no DNA left in dinosaur bones so the first thing was just trying to figure out is there DNA in those specimens Melbourne's Museum was his first stop it holds one of the world world's best collections of thylacines if it wasn't for the back room collections in museums the thylacine de-extinction project would be inconceivable on the shelves and in drawers here are precious thylacine specimens from which pask and his team had been able to extract DNA they said give us a sample of every thylacine and we said hold on a minute why don't we figure out which parts work the best every one of the cells in your house DNA just a question of how degraded that DNA is Kevin Rowe is a curator of mammals at the Museum and is working closely with pasc so these are the two that we started with sampling different places this specimen we've sampled in a few ways because we're working to try to optimize the best sources of DNA on the skin but it's this most value there it is this is my favorite specimen of all of the ones that we have here more than 110 years old it was preserved decades before the value of DNA was fully understood it was put into ethanol which was quite amazingly fortuitous what that did is it enabled it to preserve the DNA within that specimen really well and so it's actually the one that enabled us to sequence the entire genome and will be the the foundation of bringing the thylacine back but that's just the beginning how to turn the genome into a living creature is another thing in 2008 pask's team had a major breakthrough in world first they succeeded in bringing DNA from an extinct species Back to Life by inserting a thylacine fragment into a mouse we brought back a gene we thought was really important for skeletal development for the the shape and overall size of the thylacine and we can tag the gene blue so everywhere you see blue here is where you're seeing that piece of thylacine DNA our tassy tiger DNA resurrected and actually functioning in that living animal now they face a Herculean challenge bringing back the whole genome of an extinct thylacine and that's where this tiny marsupial known as The fat-tailed Donut comes into play It's amazing to think a little marsupial like this could give birth to a Tasmanian tiger the donut is the thylacine's closest living relative they intend to edit its genome to create a thylacine they're mostly the same you know we're talking 95 plus similarity between those two genomes but there's five percent of difference so what we do is we go in and we edit that five percent stem cells will be sourced from the done art then edited by colossal to match the Genome of the thylacine the nucleus of a done art egg will be replaced with the nucleus of the engineered stem cell the resulting embryo will then be implanted into its host one of the great things about marsupials is they all give birth to tiny tiny babies they're about the size of a grain of rice what that means for us is that even that little mouse-sized fat-tailed donut can give birth to a baby Tasmanian tiger even though it's going to massively outgrow the mum after birth these CT scans of rare baby thylacine specimens will then become critical we can actually map out their developmental trajectory to make sure that that final element we get is going to be developing correctly along those Pathways and if it's not then we would know that we're not recreating the thylacine so we can stop those experiments go back have a look at what other bits we can change and then create the next one and have a look at how that one's developing so really until it's born you won't know what you're going to get the whole goal with this project is to edit that genome to be 99.9 thylacine but we don't know how big a difference that point zero one percent might make but it will definitely be a thylacine and definitely have stripes I hope so I feel like we failed if it's not stripy according to pasc it will be at least 10 years before a genetically engineered thylacine cell is produced but colossal Co is much less circumspect we put a very big ambitious goal out there for the mammoth of you know five to six years and elephants have a 22 month gestation uh given that our our model organism the fat tail done art has a 14-day gestation which is obviously significantly shorter I think that it's safe to assume that we will um hopefully see one before we see a mammoth um that kind of gives you some idea of time so possibly in the next five years I think that's a really good assessment but at Sydney's Australian Museum the assessment of the thylacine de-extinction project is far from good the project is fanciful I guarantee you that in 10 years from now that animal will not be running around Tasmania this is not going to happen Chris Helgen is a Museum's Chief scientist he finds the use of the done art farsicle does that look anything like a thylacine to you and not just because of the way it looks it's not closely related to the thylacine it's about as close as you can get amongst modern species but if a thylacine is so different from all other marsupials that it's in its own family the question is could you ever modify the DNA of this animal to get it anything close to becoming this animal I say absolutely not it would be something a bit like a dog to a cat like a horse to a rhino could you possibly turn an elephant into a mammoth maybe it's just possible because they're so closely related and we know a lot about the biology of elephants so we have something to go on with thylacines we're missing all of that ground information and Hogan contends that even if something is produced it won't be a thylacine the outcome will be some kind of genetically modified done art that's not a thylacine it's a pronouncement that doesn't appear to worry colossal CEO we like to think of as a proxy species right we're not cloning these animals so what percentage of it is a thiocene versus non-thalene is still to be determined like once we get to our first couple thile scenes we'll let the world judge and say you know in my grandmother look at it and say wow it's a thylacine how close genetically do we really need right and so ultimately we want to ensure that we are developing uh an animal that can serve as the proxy to that degraded ecosystem Australia's degraded ecosystems are in crisis catastrophic bushfires droughts and massive habitat destruction have had a devastating impact more species of mammals have been lost than on any other continent and the country has one of the highest rates of species decline in the world the thylacine was absolutely critical in balancing the ecosystem from from which it came and so a great example of what happens when you lose that Predator is with the Tasmanian devils another native Australian marsupial the Tasmanian devil has long been a signature species for animals on the brink of Extinction a contagious and deadly facial tumor wiping out some 80 percent of the population now if the Tasmanian Tiger was still around it eats those sick and injured animals and it removes them from the population before they have a chance to spread that disease so we think that bringing that animal back to Tasmania would have incredible benefits not just for the Tasmanian devil population but for all sorts of unforeseen parts of that ecosystem it's a vision that realistically won't be tested here in Tasmania for decades only after thylacine proxies are studied thoroughly and deemed safe to release Into the Wild about 5 000 thylacines once roamed across Tasmania but conservationists say that bringing them back is unlikely to restore the environmental imbalance left in the wake of their demise I think it's a false premise and I think it's uh I'll be generous and say I think it's naive Nick Mooney has spent his life in the Tasmanian wilderness working for the government's Parks and Wildlife service by the time this has happened we'll have so many more extinctions and there'll be fractions of habitat left and the very best of it that the thylacine would have preferred to live in will be well and truly under lock and key fenced and pastured and all the rest of it some of it's cemented and as for benefits for the Devils he's worked to preserve they've become very rare what do you do put tile seams back in there and suppress them further and in fact the disease process is well underway and there's no way you can roll it back it's got its own momentum issue like and there's just so many moving Parts in this machine now that people are influencing from roadkill and development of All Sorts pesticides and climate change the north west of the island was once Prime thylacine habit happy one of the last devils not affected by the lethal facial tumor struggles to survive here local Wildlife volunteer Alice Carson shares photographs of devil roadkill see this is a big guy big old devil in its prime how about poor Darwin Carson says she's removed more than 160 carcasses of endangered Devils from this stretch of road in the past 18 months we haven't got room for the animals we've got now we're not prepared to share what we've got now so I it's not because I don't want Bala scenes back in the wild I'd love to see that but I'd love to see what we've got here protected as well it makes me think a very expensive lab animal might be just splattered on the road here so shortly after you release it to have a thylacine rebalance the ecology it actually has to be there in a lot of numbers throughout the landscape free-ranging if they succeed it will be a freak Show because the animals will be so valuable there's no way you can let them free range because anything can happen to them and people won't put up with them you still have an animal that people will be worried about their sheep we're here on the corner of the old van diemen's land grant and they put a lot of sheep on here and they actually employed a fire scene Hunter to try and track down the thylacines and kill them the extermination of thalassines hangs heavily in the air for Mooney it's a sobering reminder of what should never be allowed to happen again I think we should be preventing extinctions not trying to resurrect animals or in fact invent animals if we focus on this effort to reconstruct an animal we're going to teach people that Extinction isn't forever and we can fix everything later so let's not worry let the Devils die let them die this project I think is a very serious distraction for genuine nature conservation and it's the diversion of investors funds that concerns the Australian Museum's Chief scientist to spend a lot of money doing something that I think is not just infeasible but impossible is a missed opportunity I think if you really wanted to show that de-extinction was possible you would probably be starting with animals that were much less charismatic Australia's extinct native rodents or maybe extinct native bandicoots these are some animals that have very close living relatives and you might have an actual shot at achieving something but they wouldn't be the charismatic ones that would bring in those tens of millions of dollars of investment I think that anytime you're pushing the bounds of technology and doing something bold uh you know you're gonna have critics right you know what I will tell you is that the world that we live in uh needs bold Solutions we need genetic rescue Tools in order for us to save critically endangered species that exist on on the planet 250 kilometers west of Melbourne grampians National Park is home to endangered species Museum Victoria's Kevin Rowe and his team are working to ensure they'll reap the benefits from advances in genetic technology we've got a smoky Mouse a Smoky Mountain it's a Smoky Mountain here yeah the first one for the day they're collecting tissue from animals like the threatened smoking Mouse so we're hoping this guy is now breeding but in case he doesn't we've got his genetic diversity preserved as cells for the next 100 to 200 years tissue samples containing living DNA are preserved in the Museum's biobank at a temperature of less than minus 180 degrees Celsius using the preserved DNA the thylacine project is promising solutions for the more than 30 Australian marsupials under threat of Extinction the reason I love this project is because regardless of the endpoint the conservation technologies that we develop are going to be transformative for marsupials we'll have mechanisms of turning biobanks marsupial tissue back into muscle pills that we can repopulate areas after a Bushfire we want to bolster their immune system so they can survive diseases better maybe survive climate change better maybe able to deal with predators in the environment better they are things that we absolutely will unequivocally be able to achieve through this project as well as bringing the thylacine back spin-off Technologies may prove to be the Project's greatest achievement the back and mole Creek at least one thylacine lover is barking for its Resurrection whether it be one out of the wild or whether it's out of a laboratory that'd be good to see what order and then we all know what they were talking about

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 454,869

Keywords: 101 East, 101 East Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera 101 east, Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera documentary, Animal, Animal conservation, Australia, Tasmania, Tasmanian Tiger, Tiger, al jazeera live, al jazeera video, aljazeera English, aljazeera latest, aljazeera live, aljazeera live news, extinct, extinct animal, latest news, news headlines, thylacine

Id: PrL7trFhPoo

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023