S2:E34 - (Full Version) WE CAN NOW BRING BACK EXTINCT SPECIES, BUT SHOULD WE?

Animalia

Welcome to a very special episode of Animalia. Today we are talking about the merits, ethics, and potential outcomes good and bad with de-extinction. Earlier this year, a company named Colossal announced $15M in funding to create a new hybrid wooly mammoth species with plans of reintroducing them to Siberia in hopes of reviving their grasslands.

Now that the dawn of de-extinction possibilities are upon us, we need to carefully consider how this could play out, and what the positive and negative impacts on our climate and biodiversity crises could be.

We have three incredible scientists joining us for this roundtable discussion:

• Dr. Mackenzie Kwak - parasitologist at the University of Singapore
• Dr. Dave Strayer - ecologist and invasive species expert at the Cary Institute
• Dr. Lynn Rothschild - astro biologist and evolutionary biologist at Brown University

This was a fascinating and enlightening discussion that you won't want to miss!

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One short edit from Dave: In the podcast, he mentioned that humans have doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen on the planet, but he asked to correct this statement as such: that we've doubled the rate of input of reactive N on the planet (i.e., we now add as much reactive N as all natural sources combined). See Figs. 8.1 and 8.2 in Weathers et al. (eds). 2021. Fundamentals of Ecosystem Science. Academic Press.