How to Bring Passenger Pigeons All the Way Back: Ben Novak at TEDxDeExtinction

[Applause] hello well it's my job to bring the passenger pigeon back to life not just as a science novelty not as a zoo attraction but back into the skies above where we actually stand right now even Washington DC this is native passenger pigeon habitat let's talk about passenger pigeons they went extinct about a hundred years ago and having studied many of their specimens and passages I can tell you that no book and no Museum collection can ever give you the majesty of what this animal once was what we're really left with to imagine the passenger pigeon that droves of them is the prominence of art and these fantastic ghost birds and images I want to bring them out of our imagination from this inspiration and get them back into the wild what people can ask Ben how how does a person get this job that's me when I was 13 yeah yeah doing science fair my my academics goes way back how you get this job is you become very passionate about it I grew up loving conservation and to me when I looked at ecosystem level conservation there were gaps and I felt the future was in restoring those gaps those extinct species and ushering in a new age for conservation and I wanted to get ready so I started studying up on what would be the technological difficulties to overcome and I did this science fair project at age 13 going on 14 actually I still have those pants I wear those about whether or not we could bring back the dodo bird and what I learned was the dodo bird happens to be a giant extinct pigeon I know it doesn't look like it necessarily but it is and it doesn't take too long studying extinct pigeons to come across the story of the passenger pigeon this is the first image I ever saw of a passenger pigeon and I fell in love right away and what captivated me next was reading about the fact that there were billions of passenger pigeons and within a hundred years they were gone really within the span of a decade we have a complete system collapse with this berg and i think the question we raised here today we've talked about mammoths who talked about picard o--'s and and frogs and the main question at the start of any of these studies is about your animal why did I fall in love with it why do I think it needs to be back into the wild that comes down to what is it the passenger pigeon has a unique color a certain shape a certain size all things that are morphological things that you might be able to breed back in some other type of pigeon but it has this very unique behavior that I want to impart to you today that makes it a keystone species that we're interested in if we view forest ecology as a dance the only animal that can keep step with the trees is the passenger pigeon it's the dance partner of the forest and it has a huge impact and it comes down to its social structure these dense flocks coming into a roost depleting resources fertilizing the ground letting sunlight in it's a biological storm that's rejuvenating nutrients and allowing many other animals to flourish and all of this the size the morphology the behavior we can begin to start to understand not just because of the historical context we have with this bird but by starting to investigate its DNA and from that DNA we hope that we can actually bring the bird back and so thinking about this we need a certain set of ingredients to bring an animal back to life do we have DNA yes we do there happen to be 1,500 specimens of passenger pigeons worldwide from Museum mounts and fossils and collections that go all the way back to 10,000 years the DNA and the fossils show us that the passenger pigeon has been learning the choreography of its dance with the trees for several million years it's a it's a very unique dance and it's a very amazing thing for North American ecosystems I've actually sequenced some DNA out of several specimens and to date right now with some minimal effort for our preliminary designs in any form of quality from really bad to really good from one of these specimens we actually have 500 million base pairs of mapped DNA reads that's half of the entire genome so we can get the entire genome we can work with this bird but we need a genetic parent for it and that's the band-tailed pigeon recent DNA studies show that that is the closest relative it's a North West Coast to West Coast all the way down migrating into Peru of South America that's its native range so it's another North American bird familiarizing yourself with it because it's really really neat and when it comes to epigenetics other factors that people might question you know cross cloning things like this the amazing thing about pigeons is for the technology we're going to need to bring them back it's not just about recreating a genome but breeding them getting them going people have been breeding pigeons captive Lee now for about 8,000 years we're pretty good at it we've been breeding many different exotic breeds for hundreds of years now over the last few decades people have even been hybridizing different species and we're learning that different types of pigeons work very well together on the cellular level so the big question we all have of course is habitat is there passenger pigeon habitat I just said that this is a dance is the ballroom still set are there people waiting to see this happen again those people happen to be our forests this is North American forest cover of various states there happen to be many national forest areas ideal locations for re-releasing the bird and breeding the bird all of which happen to transect former migration paths and breeding zones of this bird this habitat is here not only is it here it's growing in the last 10 years the United States has seen 15,000 square miles of forest come back from abandoned agriculture in logging sections there is more passenger pigeon habitat every year so how do we make it it comes down to three major phases and don't get me wrong these are really really big phases that they're not bullet points like this creating a genome getting it into a cell coaxing that cell into being a bird and taking that bird and repopulating it to a flock the providence of conservation biology as a whole I'm here to tell you that we are building on things that already exist conservation biology has been bringing back birds for a very long time and sequencing these genomes we get to work on Hendrik poinar z-- expertise Beth Shapiro who'll be speaking later all these people have been working out the tools so we can do this and it starts by assembling DNA here we have a band-tailed pigeon DNA sequence with passenger pigeon DNA fragments mapping to it the overlapping regions are how we synthesize this back together in the computer as our data a problem with ancient DNA there will be a lot of false mutations so we need enough coverage to overrule these false mutations get a consensus of those passenger pigeon fragments that give us the passenger pigeon DNA there having to be four mutations in this sequence that matter but are they expressed are they evolutionarily important we translate that to a protein sequence and of those four mutations only one of them actually produces an expressed change is it a significant change just so happens to be a very significant change the chemical structures of those amino acids very different this is the kind of mutation we need to insert into a band-tailed pigeon genome to recreate a passenger pigeon so using George church's advancements we can synthesize a piece of DNA with that mutation and rewrite it into band-tailed pigeon DNA repackage that DNA into a viable cell inject those cells into growing embryos and raise a generation of various sorts of chimeras this is how we intend to do this project it'll most likely change as we start building information and things advanced this is our greatest technological challenge this step right here but it pales in comparison to actually trying to make the bird a natural passenger pigeon again which starts now from day one imagine you're a passenger pigeon chick you hatch where are your parents that's kind of an issue with modern conservation efforts people have used puppets to be the parents to prevent imprinting confusion with pigeons a little bit of an issue with that there's a pigeons have a biological factor that makes them very dependent on their parents that you can't simulate with a puppet this is where art is going to inspire us again these are not photoshopped these pigeons have been dyed the same way you dye your hair it doesn't hurt them that they'll shed the feathers they'll go back to their regular color so in this vein of thought when our first baby passenger pigeon hatches it doesn't have to see rock pigeon surrogate parents but it gets to see passenger pigeons at least cosmetically and this is we're working with a passenger pigeon is going to be different than many other extinct species and why I'm advocating that we should work with the passenger pigeon passenger pigeons are not good parents they abandon their young before the babies can even fly there are very few birds that do that so for the behavior that whole social structure developing that that's really left for the babies to figure out on their own and there will be an amount of that that's hidden in the DNA but we can simulate exactly how it happens because we have the historical records of people who bred them in captivity and studied them in the wild and I'm gonna paint you the story of a baby passenger pigeon right now it hatches two weeks later its parents go no you're fat enough goodbye and it's left there sitting in its nest for two to three days before it learns how to fly the only other birds around it are all the other baby passenger pigeons and they form a cohort little juvenile flock that strengthens and flies around they experiment with some food become adults and then when an adult flock migrates by they join that flock and that's how they learn where to make migrate and where to go now passenger pigeons they don't migrate to specific destinations every year they're migrating based on resources this is something critical to know about the passenger pigeon it's an opportunist eater it's dependent on the mast of trees and so it cannot outgrow the forest it cannot step out of time with the music that's playing and it's very easy for it to adapt into its former environment because of this because gonna eat many different things I can try out many different things that can learn a great deal all on its own but how do we make that adult flock so that they actually start migrating the way they used to and that's where modern pigeons and being all the trained them is going to be our salvation surrogate flocking that's what I've been calling it now we cosmetically paint a whole bunch of white homing pigeons once again like passenger pigeons and homing pigeons can be trained to fly from one site to another so in our first release to the wild we'd bring a captive flock we've got a viable flock now it bring it into an aviary we let them raise a generation let them form their cohort in their environment we take some homing pigeons and we let them ferry them to the next spot designated spots like so to their late autumn roost we let them get reacquainted with the forest the way they would be migrating to an aviary out in the woods this is called a soft release it allows them to get used to their environment without being exposed to the actual dangers of the wild because if you've only got ten passenger pigeons you don't want Falcons coming in and dwindling that down so then we're going to ferry them with a homing pigeon flock down to a winter zone and back to the breeding area and this is where replicating the the migration behavior for the future is important we don't want to bring them back to the same breeding site we don't want the future passenger pigeon to start thinking it goes to one spot every year because that's not what passenger pigeons did they're resource dependent they're not wandering around so we have multiple sites we bring them back to a different breeding spot they raise a generation they fly to a different autumn spot and we start mixing and matching every year where this flock goes and after two or three years we've had a generation of passenger pigeons that have flown the same wing beats as their historical predecessors and then we slowly take away the surrogate flocks with the first generation fairy the next we take down the aviaries and we get to witness the passenger pigeon rediscover itself in the New England and Great Lakes forests of North America and I think it's really important at this point to recognize something about the restoration of the passenger pigeon the trees in your backyard if they're a hundred and fifty years old which many of them will be they remember the feet of passenger pigeons perching on their branches the trees of our forests today had passenger pigeon nests in them not only is in the environment available for them but it's the same we're the ones who have forgotten the passenger pigeon and we have the chance now to restore it we get the chance to completely redevelop an understanding of this bird and to me the passenger pigeon then is a beacon of hope for conservation of the future it's a major signal of change for success from losing species to gaining them back and I don't think in a 15 minute presentation that I can give you 15 years of my work that will be to come but I hope that you join in in the next few years and you begin to share the same passenger pigeon passion that I have and this can be not a success for a group of scientists but an achievement for our time and our world right now for the rest of the future thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 48,400

Rating: 4.9515152 out of 5

Keywords: English, tedx talk, science, ted talk, ted, Revive & Restore, Revive and Restore, United States (Country), de-extinction, ted talks, tedx talks, ted x, TEDxDeExtinction, tedx

Id: rUoSjgZCXhc

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2013