Category: conservation

Saving Ecudadorian land for wildlife (including my frog)

August 1, 2025 • 9:25 am

Reader Lou Jost, a naturalist and evolutionist who works at the Dracula Reserve of Ecuador’s EcoMinga Foundation, just sent me this Facebook post put out by an Ecuadorian province a few years ago. It features MY frog, Atelopus coynei (it’s got a Wikipedia page, too), so it’s a bit self-aggrandizing of me to post this, but in fact the species is critically endangered and I want it saved.  There are surely other undescribed and endangered species on the property (here’s a new tree frog discovered and described by the tem on the reserve.)

The story of the frog, how it got my name, and how it seemed to have gone extinct, but, Lazarus-like, was discovered by Andreas Kay decades later in Chinambi, Carchi, Ecuador, can be seen here.

Isn’t it a beaut? I suspect that its colors indicate that the frog is aposematic, i.e., toxic or dangerous to eat or touch. (The photo is by the late Andreas Kay courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Click photo below go to the FB post:

Lou adds this:

The province is proud to be the only place in the world where your frog survives. It is one of the fruits of our work trying to raise awareness for the rare species of our reserves.

Our  president, Noboa, is firing massive numbers of public employees from ministries he doesn’t like, and closing or re-organizing them so he can do what he wants. Last week he placed the ministry of the environment into the ministry of energy and mining, and this is expected to make it harder for us to fight our main threat in the Dracula Reserve, mining.

There is at least one population of A. coynei outside our reserves. It was the first one that Andreas Kay found. We tried to buy it but the property was apparently involved in drug trafficking and arms dealing, and this scared us too much to deal with it. Maybe someday we or others will be able to protect this population too. We also continue to search for more populations using eDNA. Meanwhile we are monitoring our own populations and they are doing well. Each individual can be identified by their back pattern, so we can keep track of many of them.

If you want to donate to the reserve to save not only the frog, but tons of rainforest wildlife, Lou gave me this information:

Thanks Jerry, the Orchid Conservation Alliance is a US charity that can accept donations for us, and give tax credit for the donations. Donors should specify that their support goes to EcoMinga’s Dracula Reserve (which protects your frog)

I hope some readers can cough up a few bucks for the Reserve!  Any amount will help.

photo by Juan Pablo Reyes and Jordy Salazar/EcoMinga

Colossal Biosciences is still pretending it’s “de-extincted” the dire wolf

June 23, 2025 • 11:45 am

If you’ve read this site at all, you’ll know that Colossal Biosciences has pretended that it’s brought an extinct species back to life: the dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus), a carnivorous denizen of the temperate regions of North and South America. The dire wolf became extinct about 10,000 years ago, when there were already humans in the Americas.

The “dire wolf” project is only one of a number of de-extinction efforts Colossal has on tap, including bringing.back the dodo, the thylacine, and, most famously, the woolly mammoth.

None of these will work. What Colossal is doing is simply inserting a small handful of genes taken from “ancient DNA” sequences of fossilized animals into a close living relative (in the case of the dire wolf, that was the gray wolf), and then rearing this tweaked gray wolf in a surrogate mother (in this case, a domestic dog). Voilà: you get a gray wolf that, if you want fame and money, you can call a “dire wolf.”

But th0se genetic “edits” comprise a pitifully small fraction of the genes in the modern relative. In the case of the dire wolf, I wrote this:

 There were indeed 20 edits in the gray wolf genome, made in 14 genes, but five of those edits weren’t taken from the ancient DNA of the dire wolf; they were taken from mutations in dogs and gray wolves that resembled what Colossal thought dire wolves looked like. (We’re still not sure.) And among those five dog/wolf mutants were the color alleles that turned the faux wolves white.

Note that gray wolves have about 20,000 genes, so a maximum of only 0.07% of the gray wolf genome had been changed to something similar to the genome of dire wolvees, and some of those changes actually came from mutations in dogs and wolves.

For example, Colossal decided to color their dire wolves white, so they found color mutations in dogs or wolves that made these canids white, and inserted those mutations into the gray wolf genome.  It is highly unlikely that ancient dire wolves really were white; Colossal probably did this because the model “Dire Wolf” in the series “Game of Thrones” was white! A white canid on the savannah or plains would stick out like a sore thumb to its prey. I know of no temperate-zone canid or felid that’s white; the only white canids we see live in the Arctic, where they turn white in the winter.

I summarized four big problems with the dire wolf project in a Boston Globe op-ed called “De-extinction is a colossal disappointment” or go here to read the several posts I’ve written here about these misleading projects.  It’s important to realize that Colossal did not de-extinct the Dire Wolf. As I wrote in the Globe:

First, and most important, “de-extinction” is not de-extinction. The company says its claim to have de-extincted the dire wolf is legitimate because its edited pups meet some of the criteria for species “proxies” established in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But that claim is bogus. What Colossal has made is simply a gray wolf with a handful of genetic tweaks changing its size and color.

Eventually Colossal, through its chief scientist Beth Shapiro, admitted in a New Scientist article that no, it hadn’t made dire wolves but simply slightly genetically modified gray wolves. To wit (click to read):

But, realizing that this admission undercut the “gee-whiz” aspect of “de-extinction,” Shapiro and Colossal immediately did a 180º turn and asserted that yes, they really had made dire wolves—simply because they made a gray wolf that, they assumed, would grow up looking like the ancient dire wolf (they made three of these white wolves). In other words, if they made an gray wolf that resembled in some slight degree the extinct dire wolf (and let’s ignore behavior and ecology, which are unknown for the extinct canid), then they had brought back the dire wolf.  This is, of course, arrant nonsense.

Now Colossal, in a newsletter, doubles down again, affirming that it really has brought back the dire wolf. There are two videos and enthusiastic celebration of “de-extinction”. I quote from the newsletter (I’ve bolded every reference to their claim that they do have de-extincted dire wolves):

The dire wolves are growing. Fast.

Catch up on their latest milestones and massive growth in Pupdate 002.

Colossal’s Chief Animal Officer Matt James and animal husbandry manager Paige McNickle share the newest updates on the world’s first de-extinct dire wolves. At just over 6 months old and already weighing more than 90 pounds—around 20% larger than a gray wolf of the same age—they are hitting some major milestones. The pups are headed to their first vet visit for bloodwork and CT scans, and their diet has advanced to bones, chunk meat, and organ meat, and will soon move to full carcasses to mimic natural wild feeding.

Pack dynamics are also shifting as Remus steps into the alpha role with quiet confidence, while Romulus embraces his beta energy. And with Khaleesi’s introduction on the horizon, everything could change again.

Do not miss the first major update since their de-extinction debut.

Well, of course they doubled in size: they were just pups when they were released in their Secret Pasture somewhere in America! In the video below, Colossal is also crowing that the wolves are up to 20% larger (heavier?) than gray wolves at the same age, but they don’t say that this could be due to the highly enriched diet that the three white wolves have been given. The Colossal wolves do not have to hunt, but are handed high-quality kibble, organs, and ground meat, as well as bones: Could that have made them larger?

This is disingenuous all the way home.  I have no respect for Colossal, which has allowed the “de-extinction” hype to overwhelm the science. They are shills and should be ashamed of themselves.

If you want more of this, Beth Shapiro got the most publicity possible in this day and age by touting, among other stuff, the “de-extinction” stuff on the Joe Rogan Show. Rogan!

I can’t bear to listen to all three hours of this, but perhaps a patient reader can and will report in the comments:

My Boston Globe op-ed about the fallacies of “de-extinction”

May 1, 2025 • 9:40 am

Yes, we’ve all heard that three white dire wolves are running around at some secret location, and we’ve heard about Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based firm that, it says, is going to fix the “colossal problem” of extinction. The main way they propose to do it—and the bit that’s gained all the attention—is to “de-extinct” animals by finding fossil DNA of extinct species, sequencing some bits that presumptively code for a few of their traits, and then, using CRISPR, put those bits into the fertilized eggs of a living species that’s a close living relative. That way you get a hybrid animal, which is by necessity genetically about 99.9% or more of the living species but with a few traits of the extinct species. Then–voilà–you can say you have “de-extincted” the species. The misleading hype involved in that verb is obvious.

For example, dire wolf genes were extracted from fossil specimens, and 15 of those bits were edited into 14 genes in the fertilized egg of a grey wolf (they actually put in 20 bits, but 5 of those involved mutations existing in dogs and wolves.  Since the grey wolf genome has 2.4 billion bases, you can see that only a tiny bit of dire wolf genome went into the wolf genome. The edited wolf egg was then transferred into surrogate dog mothers, and the mostly-grey-wolf hybrids were extracted by caesarian section (the dogs weren’t killed).  Voilà: they got three largish white wolves that they called dire wolves.  (The white color, by the way, did not come from the dire wolf DNA bnt from dog or coyote mutations. They edited whiteness into the hybrid because dire wolves were white when they featured, much larger, in the t.v. show Game of Thrones. We don’t know what color the dire wolves really were, but I doubt it was snow white. They did not live in snowy areas.)

The Big Project of Colossal, however, is the “de-extincting” of the woolly mammoth, a project I’ve discussed on this site before. (The dodo and thylacine are also on tap to be edited back to life.) Colossal promises that we’ll have faux mammoths—which paleobiologist and mammoth expert Tori Herridge denigrated as “elephants in a fur coat” because a few of the changes will involve hairiness—by 2028. Good luck with that!

There are many problems with the “de-extinction” scenarios that have nevertheless raked in $435 million for Colossal thanks to donors like Paris Hilton and Tiger Woods. And although other scientists like Tori and Adam Rutherford have described some of these problems, I decided to summarize them all in one place for American readers.  Thus my op-ed in today’s Boston Globe, which you can find here, though it may be paywalled. Clicking on the headline below, however will take you to a non-paywalled archived version of the text.

The article summarizes four major problems with “de-extinction”, which you can read in the article.  The Globe had a special piece of art made to illustrate my article, and I absolutely love it (see below, and notice the hook).  The illustration is the creation of Patric Sandri, a Swiss artist. Thanks to the artist and especially to my editor, who was perhaps the most amiable and easiest op-ed editor I’ve ever worked with.

Enjoy (unless you work for Colossal)!

Illustration by Patric Sandri for the Boston Globe

More on the “dire wolf”: Adam Rutherford is furious

April 9, 2025 • 10:45 am

Like me, Matthew Cobb, and all straight-thinking scientists, geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford is sick of hearing claims about the return of “de-extincted animals.” The latest one is the Dire Wolf, a tricked-out gray wolf I wrote about yesterday. (See also Rutherford’s strong critique in the Guardian of the woolly mammoth de-extinction project.) The hype about the “de-extintcted Dire Wolf” involves making only 20 DNA base changes in 14 genes of the Gray Wolf (there are probably a bit more than 20,000 genes in wolves), so that only a few superficial characters like body size, jaw structure, and color were changed in the wolf genome. (The “Dire Wolf” came out white, but that was done using edits of wolf genes, not the insertion of color genes from the ancient DNA of Dire Wolves. We don’t know if real Dire Wolves were white.)

All these de-extinction projects involve changing just a few genes among thousands in the genome of living species, making something that only superficially looks like an extinct species. But, as Adam points out in his piece I highlight below, we know nothing about the behavior, gestation, physiology or digestion of these ancient creatures, and so are powerless to even get close to a real Dire Wolf—even if we had the ability to edit thousands of genes or even to insert a Dire Wolf genome into a wolf cell whose nucleus had been removed. (We can’t do that.)

Yet despite this, Colossal Bioscience keeps proclaiming that it’s resurrected an extinct wolf, and will soon be bringing back other extinct creatures like the dodo and thylacine.  This is pure hype, and it’s not gonna happen—not in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our kids.  Yet compliant journalists play along with Colossal, pretending that, yes, the Dire Wolf is back and the woolly mammoth is right around the corner.  To anybody who appreciates accurate science writing, this unholy collusion between the media and Colossal is reprehensible.

And so Adam has gotten more and more pissed off in the past few days, finally writing a short piece on his Substack post that takes the whole de-extinction hype apart. And it’s laden with plenty of expletives and profanity! I don’t blame him, for that same language goes on in my brain, but I lack the courage to put it on paper. But I’ll quote him below.

First, Adam announces his piece with a link.

The resurrection circus keeps clowning, but make no mistake, Dire wolves remain very extinct. An angry, sweary piece by a frustrated geneticist. arutherford.substack.com/p/dire-wolve…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T06:22:55.899Z

The link is above, or you can go to his Substack site and read it (for free, but subscribe if you want to support his writing). Click below:

A few excerpts:

Extinction, with that one shitty exception, is forever. I’ve talked about this incessantly, with increasing humourlessness, for a number of years, once explaining to an Irish priest on live radio about the difficulties in artificial insemination due to the right-angled bend in the vaginal tract of an African elephant. Last year I appeared on the Infinite Monkey Cage and shat on the whole idea from a great height. This was unlinked to any particular press release, just a very popular subject that is worthy of interrogation, and ripe for a few gallows humour gags. Last month, when Colossus Bioscience – the company fuelling the mammoth resurrection gargleballs – released an un-peer-reviewed paper in which they unveiled a genetically modified mouse, its genome edited to include mammoth versions of a couple of genes. The hirsute mouse came out not cold adapted as was intended, but certainly a bit hairy. My write up was in the Guardian, and there’s little more to add to it.

Today, the press is awash with fawning headlines about the successful de-extinction by Colossus Bioscience of the Dire Wolf. Three pups are now alive, and they are cute.

Let me be absolutely clear on this though: no matter how cute they are, this story is absolute bollocks. No amount of fancy pictures, cool legendary names (Romulus, Remus and one from Game of Thrones), or American-brand biotech TED-style glossy hubris can change this. I’m just going to list the ways that this vexes me, and should vex you too.

ONE: The newborn wolves are not Dire Wolves. There isn’t a definition on Earth by which they could be considered Dire Wolves. Romulus, Remus and the one from Game of Thrones are Grey Wolves, an entirely different species, whose genomes have a very small number of edits that make those genes a bit more like Dire Wolf versions of the same genes. They are, by any sensible definition, genetically engineered grey wolves.

There are four ways that Rutherford’s kishkes are roiled by Colossal, but I’ll let you read the list. He does, however, make a good analogy to explain how far Colossal was from creating a genuine Dire Wolf, or even a Dire Wolf-ish canid:

I’m trying to think of an analogy: we often use books and words as metaphors for genetics. There are around 19,000 Grey Wolf genes, and Colossus Bioscience have made TWENTY individual edits of single letters of DNA in 14 genes. Certainly, that is enough to make a noticeable difference to the phenotypes in question, but if you think that renders it a different species, it’s back to Evolution 101 for you.

Consider this: My longest book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Lived, has around 120,000 words. The US version has words like colour, flavour and favourite edited to be color, flavor and favorite. There are 79 uses of the word colour, colours or coloured in the UK version. So there are four times more edits in my book than in the wolf genomes. Is it still the same book? OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS.

And of course he points out that dire wolves ran in packs, but “these three Grey Wolves have been brought into the world without their packs, without wolf parents (their surrogate mothers were dogs), as gaudy boutique animals for a greedy, morally suspect company.”  Yep, we can’t resurrect their social life, which we know nothing about, so we’ll never be able to let these things go free in nature, where they’d probably revert to gray wolves quickly. They’re only good for gawking at.  And we have learned almost nothing about the Dire Wolf from this project. It is the media’s distortion of what was done, and its credulous acceptance of this exaggeration, which leads Rutherford, Matthew, and I to a state of peevishness.  For in the end this kind of science reporting simply deludes the public.

Rutherford, like many of us, has great respect for Carl Zimmer’s science reporting, but Adam thinks that Zimmer reverted to “client journalism” in his NYT piece on the Dire Wolf (free access), more or less accepting that Colossal had come “close” to recreating a Dire Wolf.  When one respected science journalist disses another, you know that something has gone wrong. Rutherford says this:

Even Carl Zimmer, a mensch and doyen of American science journalism couldn’t quite manage to debunk their claims in the New York Times’ fawning write up.

On de-extinction…‘Colossal Bioscience appear to have done it, or something close’, he writes. Well, they haven’t done it, and if by ‘close’ he means ‘have done minor edits on a grey wolf so that it could barely be described as a hybrid let alone a resurrected species’ then fair game. And I’m pretty sure Carl knows that.

‘Or something close’. Disappointing client journalism from one of the best science journalists.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T22:00:48.349Z

As the Time magazine cover shows below (with one obvious edit by Rutherford), the press guzzled it like a cat with cream.  Rutherford:

. . . the press have just lapped all this wolfshit up, and regurgitated it, mostly without the slightest questioning of the corporate press release. Barely ANY reports have rebutted the dubious claims by Colossus. Time magazine has it on the cover, the word ‘extinct’ crossed out. That scientifically illiterate megalomaniacal fragile lunch Elon Musk tweeted it to his 218 million twitter followers (I will not call it X), with a picture from Game of Thrones.

Clearly, Time crossed out “extinct,” while the insertion “not’ is from Rutherford:

Many of us were surprised that Beth Shapiro, a a highly-regarded molecular evolutionist at UC Santa Cruz, took three years off to become the chief scientific officer of Colossal. Why? One can guess, but I don’t psychologize. At any rate, Shapiro appears to have bought into the Colossal hype, as Graham Coop (an evolutionary biologist at UC Davis) points out below:

Joking aside, this stuff about species concepts is such transparent BS. [deleted & reposted, as first draft was too annoyed.] http://www.newscientist.com/article/2475…

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T21:50:13.253Z

WHAT?  A morphological species concept in which changing a couple of traits creates a new species? How much does the “de-extincted” Dire Wolf have to look like the real Dire Wolf before we can say “we have it back!!”?  This species concept, which I discuss and dismiss in my book Speciation with Allen Orr, has many flaws, including the fact that many truly reproductively incompatible species nevertheless are hard or impossible to tell apart by looking. (These are often called “sibling species.”) Would Shapiro classify Japenese, the Dutch, and sub-Saharan Africans as belonging to different species?

As Coop notes as he quotes Shapiro, what she says about species concepts is “transparent BS”. (Read chapter 1 and the Appendix of Speciation if you want to learn more.)

Coop gets in one more lick:

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T13:56:25.311Z

Another science communicator joins the crowd of people with a beef against this faux “Dire Wolf.”

Scientists love to debate and argue, but if there are 3 things every scientist absolutely agrees on, it's that:1. Climate change is real2. Vaccines work3. Those are NOT dire wolves 😤🧪

— Science Sam (@samanthayammine.com) 2025-04-08T20:36:29.683Z

And somebody couldn’t resist comparing the Colossal wolf to the famous jackalope!

I’ll close with a few final posts from Rutherford, who, though unable to contain the profanity, is correct in what he says below:

Reposting this from last month, cos it’s the same bullshit from the same company that is flooding your media with wolfshit. Reviving the woolly mammoth isn’t just unethical. It’s impossiblewww.theguardian.com/commentisfre…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T06:16:47.426Z

Amen, brother! No clones, either!

Apropos of nothing:THERE WILL NEVER EVER EVER BE A CLONED MAMMOTH. <Message ends>

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T16:56:07.751Z

Dire-ish wolf

April 8, 2025 • 11:30 am

Readers and correspondents are asking me what i think about the just-revealed “de-extinction” of the dire wolf by Colossal Biosciences, and the firm’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth, too.  I don’t want to write much about this now because I’ve put up a few posts about the mammoth before, and Matthew has expressed similar sentiments in his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.  Further, I am writing my take for another venue, so I will just say this about the genetics of the de-extinction efforts so far:

My general sentiments are these: attempts to bring back extinct species as outlined so far are not only scientifically misguided, but are journalistically mis-reported by the press.  That is, the press is, by and large, distorting what has been done scientifically, pretending that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is actually identical to an extinct species. Further, Colossal seems happy enough to let this misconception be widely reported (to be fair, there are some decent articles about the science of de-extinction, and I’ll link to a few below).

The main problem, as I said, is the pretense that changing a living species by editing just a handful of genes (20 max so far) to get something that looks like the extinct “dire wolf” is not the same thing as re-creating a dire wolf.  That species undoubtedly had hundreds or thousands of genetic differences from the gray wolf, including genes affecting metabolism and behavior—genes that we do not know.  Further, control regions of genes, which are outside protein-coding regions, undoubtedly are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives. But we don’t know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

All of this means that, in my view, de-extincting species is a cosmetic rather than a serious genetic project, designed to produce gee-whiz animals to entertain rich people and to wow children.  Such animals, especially the highly touted de-extincted mammoth, which mammoth expert Tori Herridge calls “an elephant in a fur coat”, would certainly not survive in their original habitat.  Further, proponents’ claims that de-extinction would be a fantastic conservation effort , and could even mitigate global warming. are totally unsupported speculations.

There are two such efforts that have received all the press: the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and of the dire wolf; the latter effort has produced some pups, but they are not dire wolves. We will never see woolly mammoths, though Colossal promises that they’ll be stomping about in three years!

Mammoth (see my website posts above) There are many reasons why this project is a non-starter.  The evidence that it is feasible rests solely on the production of “woolly mice,” which are mice that have had 8 edits in only 7 genes (remember, mice are easier to work with than elephants!).  Only two of the genes that were changed were edited in a way to conform to known mammoth genes. The rest are simply using mouse mutants known to affect hair texture, color, and waviness in lab mice.  Thus we have a woolly mouse—not anything close to a woolly elephant. Yes, it’s cool to make multiple changes in multiple genes at once, but this is not a new technology. The novelty will be to edit an elephant egg cell in a way that the edited cell can be implanted in an Asian elephant and develop into a woolly mammoth. If you really want something popping out of an Asian elephant that is close to a woolly mammoth, you will never get it. In fact, the whole project seems impossible to me. And the conservation results touted by Colossal–that the re-exincted mammoths, released on the tundra, will keep carbon in the permafrost and not in the atmosphere–are purely speculative.

Dire wolf:  Scientists edited a gray wolf stem cell, changing 20 genes. Fifteen of the edited genes were designed from from the sequenced dire-wolf genome (again, sequencing an extinct organism is a feat, but not one developed by Colossal), while five others were taken from known genes that change dogs or wolves (the articles aren’t clear on which genes were used, as Colossal is keeping that secret).  The edited cell, as an egg, was placed into a “large dog” to be the surrogate mom, and then extracted via caesarian section (did the dogs survive this procedure?) They get a whitish wolf with some dog or gray-wolf genes, not dire wolf genes. All of the changes are said to affect things like fur color, body size, and tooth and jaw configuration–traits that differentiated the dire wolf from the gray wolf.  As I noted, we wind up with a gray wolf (and remember, domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, and can even be considered gray wolves, as they mate with each other and can produce fertile hybrids); we get a gray wolf with a couple of changed traits to make it look like what we think the dire wolf looked like. (We are not sure, for example, that the dire wolf had white fur.)

Neither the mammoth nor the dire wolf results are published in a peer-reviewed journals, though the woolly mouse experiment has been languishing on bioRΧiv for a while but hasn’t been published.

Here are some links, most but not all of them pointing out problems with de-extinction projects:

Colossal’s explanation of  the mammoth project. (Note that they also want to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine, or marsupial wolf.)

Colossal’s account on the dire wolf result.

Nature paper by Ewen Calloway on why the woolly mouse isn’t a credible step towards a woolly mammoth.

Nature paper by Tori Herridge explaining why she turned down a position as advisor to Colossal on the mammoth

Article in Ars Technica by Nitin Sekar, WWF authority on conserving the Asian elephant, explaining why “Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation.”

Guardian paper by Adam Rutherford explaining why trying to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth is not only unethical, but impossible.

NYT article by Carl Zimmer on the dire wolf, a good summary and not nearly as critical as his Bluesky post below.

New Yorker article by D. T. Max on the dire wolf, somewhat windy and credulous (archived here).

Article in the MIT Technology Review by Antonio Regalado: “Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?”

Tweets and posts:

Tori Herridge’s posts on both Twitter and Bluesky are an informative and hilarious critique of the woolly mouse/mammoth projects. Get started with this one if you’d like (it’s a thread):

[though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant — I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!]*MAMMOUSE KLAXON*www.nature.com/articles/s41…

— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T00:20:55.808Z

Journalist Asher Elbein and a commenter on the misleading Dire Wolf.

Here Carl Zimmer points out that Colossal’s dire wolf is not a dire wolf. This is a bit more frank than his NYT article!

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s&#8230;

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-04-07T16:38:15.772Z

Adam Rutherford (read his Guardian article on mammoths above) is particularly critical of the Dire Wolf project. I love the first tweet asserting that journalists who don’t do due diligence are making people stupider. That’s true, and it also makes people misunderstand (and possibly eventually mistrust) science:

Public service announcement. They are not Dire Wolves. They have 20 single letter changes in their entire genomes. I’ve done shits with more mutations. Every time journalists write up a Colossus press release, They are making people stupider. Client journalism by a ridiculous company.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T20:02:25.283Z

GODDAMIT. IT’S NOT A RESURRECTED DIRE WOLF. 20 edits in 19,000 genes. IT’S NOT GOING TO AID CONSERVATION. EVERY WRITE UP THAT SWALLOWS AND REGURGITATES THIS GUFFERY WOLFSHIT IS DOING PR FOR A FUNDING ROUND.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T12:05:49.778Z

Caveat emptor!

Oh, and for fun, here’s the Secretary of the Interior tweeting about how we shouldn’t worry so much about endangered species and pay more attention to “de-extincting” species.  But of course “de-extincting” isn’t going to do squat to keep existing species from waning. Burgum is off the rails here, entranced by the dire gray wolf.

ZeFrank on the waning of fireflies

April 4, 2025 • 12:30 pm

Here’s a short ZeFrank video on the apparent waning of fireflies, which are luminescent species of beetles in the family Lampyridae. Wikipedia notes as well that fireflies seem to be disappearing worldwide, and there are many reasons why this should be so:

Firefly populations are thought to be declining worldwide. While monitoring data for many regions are scarce, a growing number of anecdotal reports, coupled with several published studies from Europe and Asia, suggest that fireflies are endangered. Recent IUCN Red List assessments for North American fireflies have identified species with heightened extinction risk in the US, with 18 taxa categorized as threatened with extinction.

Fireflies face threats including habitat loss and degradation, light pollution, pesticide use, poor water quality, invasive species, over-collection, and climate change. Firefly tourism, a quickly growing sector of the travel and tourism industry, has also been identified as a potential threat to fireflies and their habitats when not managed appropriately. Like many other organisms, fireflies are directly affected by land-use change (e.g., loss of habitat area and connectivity), which is identified as the main driver of biodiversity changes in terrestrial ecosystems. Pesticides, including insecticides and herbicides, have also been indicated as a likely cause of firefly decline. These chemicals can not only harm fireflies directly but also potentially reduce prey populations and degrade habitat. Light pollution is an especially concerning threat to fireflies. Since the majority of firefly species use bioluminescent courtship signals, they are also sensitive to environmental levels of light and consequently to light pollution.A growing number of studies investigating the effects of artificial light at night on fireflies has shown that light pollution can disrupt fireflies’ courtship signals and even interfere with larval dispersal. Researchers agree that protecting and enhancing firefly habitat is necessary to conserve their populations. Recommendations include reducing or limiting artificial light at night, restoring habitats where threatened species occur, and eliminating unnecessary pesticide use, among many others.

The video describes various ways of monitoring their abundance as well as reprising the causes of decline describe above. When I was a kid, fireflies were abundant during the summer, and we would catch them and put them in jars to make lanterns (we’d let them go afterwards).  Now I can’t remember when I last saw one of these amazing insects. It’s very sad.

I could go on about how they emit light, and the amazing species that flash synchronously, but I’ll leave that ZeFrank in a future video. But if you want to donate, just go to this page of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and cough up a few bucks.

 

h/t Matthew Cobb

NBC News gets the woolly mammoth story badly wrong

March 19, 2025 • 10:30 am

I’ve posted quite a bit on the futility of attempts to bring back the woolly mammoth via genetic engineering. In my view, it’s close to a scam that deludes the public about what the geneticists really intend to produce, which, as Dr Tori Herridge at the University of Sheffield calls it, is simply “an elephant in a fur coat”. For my posts on this debacle, inspired by conversations with Matthew Cobb, go here. But there are two other useful references that Matthew provided, with links:

An extract from his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

and

The geneticists also want to resurrect the dodo and the thylacine, equally futile endeavors. But despite all the problems that scientists have noted, for some reason many science journalists are still selling the “mammoth resurrection” tale as told by Colossal Biosciences, a company with $10.2 billion dollars in funds.

As I watched NBC News last night, I was upset to see that NBC had also bought the story, selling it as the program’s final “There’s good news tonight” upbeat story. You can watch it below, but do it today as they replace the news each day. Click on the screenshot below and start the segment at 18:29 (turn up the sound using the icon at the left bottom of the screen):

First, Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm says that the company aims, besides producing mammoths, to  “return balance to ailing ecosystems.” That is ridiculous. Is the tundra ailing because of the absence of mammoths, and, if so, will a couple of elephants in fur coats, not adapted to that ecosystem, cure it? Which ecosystem will the dodos “cure”?

He adds, misleadingly, “We actually took the genes that made a mammoth a mammoth, mapped them to mice, and then in only one month we produced living, healthy mice.”  He doesn’t mention the huge mortality in this experiment, nor that they didn’t REALLY use mammoth genes, but mice genes that had a few DNA bases changed to the mammoth version (As I recall, they changed I think only three bases in seven mouse genes.) There was no attempt to insert full mammoth genes into mice, and they really couldn’t because they’d have to insert the control regions, too.

Lamm’s statement is flat wrong, and misleads the listener into thinking that they put mammoth hair genes into mice, making the mice “woolly.” In fact, as I pointed out before, the wooliest of all the mice had no mammoth-informed DNA in it. There is not the slightest indication that the lipid-related gene they put in the mice will increase their ability to withstand cold.

Lamm also neglects to mention the difficulty of getting entire mammoth chromosomes into the egg of an Asiatic elephant, nor the impossibility of constructing the Volkswagen-sized artificial elephant uteruses that would be needed to grow up the “mammothy” embryos to birth.

Finally, in view of the futility of this project, another Colossal officer says that their endeavors have inspired children to love science, and perhaps to save the environment. That’s the Hail Mary call of a dying project.  Note that they project the production of the first mammoth (again, just an “elephant in a fur coat”  for 2028. Only three more years! Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to put a giant fur coat onto an Asiatic elephant and then usher several of these garbed pachyderms to the tundra?

There are many changes–probably millions–necessary to convert an Asiatic elephant to a woolly mammoth, including those affecting behavior and metabolism. They will not accomplish such a conversion. Nor will they accomplish it with the dodo nor the thylacine. But Colossal talks a good game, as you see, and they’ve pulled the wool (pardon the pun) over the eyes of the public and of many credulous journalists. Shame on NBC News for not doing due diligence.