Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
Speaker 2: Listening to podcast, you can't predict anything.
Speaker 1: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 1: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
Speaker 1: for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every
Speaker 1: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
Speaker 1: dot com. F I R S T L I T
Speaker 1: E dot com. All right, everybody hot, damn.
Speaker 3: It's first episode is doctor Renela.
Speaker 4: Oh you stole the okay, Phil, cue up the music.
Speaker 4: I was you weren't supposed to introduce yourself that way.
Speaker 2: It was gonna be a surprise.
Speaker 3: My daughter teases my ears. With that hat on? Do
Speaker 3: you know what you can tell by the hat? What
Speaker 3: you got going on?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Like lesser people with the square hat, they don't.
Speaker 1: They're not they don't have that hat. Notice that you've
Speaker 1: got an octagon going You get a different You get a.
Speaker 4: Taking photos of Steve with his diploma.
Speaker 1: Hey man, you guys, just is there a tier above
Speaker 1: that of other hands?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 1: I think that's the top half.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's like Pope after that.
Speaker 1: I don't know that they make a better.
Speaker 2: Hat than that.
Speaker 5: Where'd you put that diploma?
Speaker 1: Well, that's just the you know, a little inside.
Speaker 3: Baseball here, it's just a mod that's a prop.
Speaker 1: My actual diploma, my actual diploma is a big framed thing.
Speaker 3: And you can imagine that.
Speaker 1: It'll be right over your head probably right here is
Speaker 1: the time of my life. Down there is the tassel.
Speaker 2: Go on a certain side.
Speaker 1: It's pinned. Oh, it's pinned in place. M a couple
Speaker 1: of things. You guys think it's all like. You guys
Speaker 1: think it's all grave. You haven't that happen to you. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you something, something you might not realize. So
Speaker 1: you go up.
Speaker 3: You go up.
Speaker 1: It's in the it's in the arena, you know, like
Speaker 1: one hundreds, like six hundred and fifty students, all their parents.
Speaker 1: You march up and the seat they give you is
Speaker 1: right by the right in the line of action.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3: And it's televised.
Speaker 1: So you stand up and you get what they call hooded,
Speaker 1: which you can't really see in that picture because it's
Speaker 1: all going on behind your hood's all going on behind you.
Speaker 1: They give you that. You give up, and you give
Speaker 1: your speech, and I gave a speech called There's No
Speaker 1: Plan B. Then you sit down and then they have
Speaker 1: to hand six hundred and fifty diplomas. But you're on
Speaker 1: the camera is aimed in such a way that you're there.
Speaker 5: Not doing anything.
Speaker 3: They've warned you, don't fiddle around, don't look at your phone.
Speaker 4: I fell asleep during my graduation. There's a picture of
Speaker 4: me sleeping.
Speaker 1: I was wide away because you had to sit there
Speaker 1: for all those people.
Speaker 6: How long did that take?
Speaker 5: A couple hours?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there was a morning and an afternoon ceremony.
Speaker 1: They split the schools.
Speaker 2: Which one were you?
Speaker 3: I was in the morning.
Speaker 2: Sce Is that one more prime time?
Speaker 1: I don't think that anybody looks at it that way.
Speaker 1: They split the schools. So my honorary doctor was from
Speaker 1: the School of Forestry and Conservation. So that school all
Speaker 1: the foresters were coming up. Which is like a stressful
Speaker 1: time to be coming out of a forestry program right now,
Speaker 1: because that was like, you know, so many of those
Speaker 1: kids that come out of that forestry program, I'm going
Speaker 1: to land management agencies. It's stressful.
Speaker 6: A doctorate in an area outside of your your area
Speaker 6: of expertise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, like technically, like I think the forestry part,
Speaker 1: but the School of Forestry and Conservation covers a lot
Speaker 1: of areas that are of relevance. The fact I went
Speaker 1: and had I went and did like a Q and
Speaker 1: A with the forestry students who have a lot of
Speaker 1: considerations around conservation funding and other issues. So I don't
Speaker 1: think they mean that I'm like as good as Seth
Speaker 1: as telling what trees are what right.
Speaker 3: Jean Seth was in forestry school.
Speaker 1: There's a test where you have to identify a hundred
Speaker 1: and some trees by the bud, not the leaf a stick.
Speaker 5: Bet you Doug Dern could do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's pretty good. So they were doing a podcast
Speaker 1: on something hardly anyone know about except for people who
Speaker 1: listen to this show. This is old subject for people
Speaker 1: who listen to the show, but other than that, everybody
Speaker 1: found out about them from Game of Thrones.
Speaker 3: Dire Wolves.
Speaker 1: This is our current estimate. Is this to be our
Speaker 1: second and a half episode on this subject.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because we had a first one.
Speaker 1: We had a first one which was episode four six six,
Speaker 1: which was called dire Wolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs, which
Speaker 1: was with Doctor Angela Perry.
Speaker 4: That was number one, and then our half one half one,
Speaker 4: touching on it with today's guest.
Speaker 1: With today's guest Matt James from Colossal Bioscience, as we
Speaker 1: touched on dire wolves, so there's one point five. At
Speaker 1: the conclusion of today's episode, the count will be up
Speaker 1: to two point five. If you if you did learn
Speaker 1: about that there was such a thing once upon a
Speaker 1: time called a dire wolf from Game of Thrones, which
Speaker 1: was a misleading portrayal, then you might have caught headlines
Speaker 1: such as everywhere, a headline everywhere on the planet that you
Speaker 1: could possibly have a headline. Scientists say they have resurrected
Speaker 1: the dire wolf, the return of the dire Wolf, the
Speaker 1: dire Wolf is back, Scientists revived the dire wolf or
Speaker 1: something else. Massive amounts of coverage everywhere about Colossal Bioscience's
Speaker 1: dire Wolf project. So today we're going to dig into
Speaker 1: all kinds of questions around that, including the big one,
Speaker 1: why why would you do that? What exactly are they
Speaker 1: and uh is it in fact? Like how do you
Speaker 1: make it relevant to conservation? But first the news here's
Speaker 1: my news item. We already covered my my heightened level
Speaker 1: of everything, which is my ascendency.
Speaker 3: Certainly a framing coming home from my ascendency.
Speaker 1: We drive all the way home and I'm pulling into
Speaker 1: my you know, like not my driveway, but our circle
Speaker 1: where our house is off, and I see a crow
Speaker 1: like we pull in and up ahead of me, I
Speaker 1: see a crow like regurgitate what I take to be
Speaker 1: a synthetic item, baby blue like a baby. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: and I already tell my kids, like, what is that
Speaker 1: thing doing? And all of a sudden, he's he like
Speaker 1: deposits out of his mouth two robin eggs he carried
Speaker 1: at the same time, mm just standing in the road,
Speaker 1: and he like spits two robin eggs out. He starts
Speaker 1: pecking at one and pulls out a little robin undeveloped robin.
Speaker 1: At this point, my younger boy and my daughter out
Speaker 1: of the truck, heading toward the crow, which leaves its
Speaker 1: whole project in the road and flies off. My older
Speaker 1: boy is now heading to he's like making plans to
Speaker 1: kill the crow in retaliation. But my daughter gets there
Speaker 1: and she comes back to the truck and in her
Speaker 1: hand is a little writhing, featherless pink robin, and on
Speaker 1: the other hand is an egg with a little crack.
Speaker 4: I know where this is going.
Speaker 1: Well, I make my older boy dispatch the I make
Speaker 1: him kill the one that isn't going to survive. He
Speaker 1: use his boots, but his fingers. Then my daughter goes
Speaker 1: around everywhere trying to find a robin ness to put
Speaker 1: the egg in.
Speaker 3: And I'm telling you it what works. It's cracked.
Speaker 1: And then she's getting upset and more upset and can't
Speaker 1: find a nest. I said, but I want to return
Speaker 1: to what I telling you. It'll never live. It's cracked,
Speaker 1: so now is living in it's buried, no garden. I
Speaker 1: thought it was gonna's nutrients will return.
Speaker 4: I thought this was like, you're gonna put it under
Speaker 4: like a pen picture.
Speaker 1: She was, she was, She's like, I know, it's expensive,
Speaker 1: we need to get in. I'm like, sweetheart, it's cracked.
Speaker 1: Like there's nothing you're gonna do. You're gonna put it
Speaker 1: so it's returning to the earth. In fact, it's gonna
Speaker 1: turn into raspberries. No, it's it's actually where it's positioned,
Speaker 1: it will be an acorn squash.
Speaker 5: We've got.
Speaker 6: You've got to rob a nest up under our portrait
Speaker 6: now and I'm just waiting. You know how those babies
Speaker 6: they can't. They'll come out of the nest, but they
Speaker 6: can't really fly real well, when that happens, the dog's
Speaker 6: going to eat them.
Speaker 1: This is just gonna happen.
Speaker 5: Well yeah, I mean, what am I gonna do?
Speaker 1: Mo the whole nest? No? I would be smart. You
Speaker 1: know what was one of the more interesting things we've
Speaker 1: had on the show over the years is, you know
Speaker 1: the myth that if you like go near the egg
Speaker 1: as abandoned or something. You remember when we had you know,
Speaker 1: the whole thing if you touch a fawn, remember we
Speaker 1: had Randall Kaufman and Matt from Keith or montef He's like, well,
Speaker 1: that's true. None of our colloring projects would ever work out.
Speaker 3: Where we like.
Speaker 1: Net them, handle them and then they stand up and
Speaker 1: go back with their mom.
Speaker 3: You know, uh, probably I was raised to believe it's.
Speaker 2: A good assumption to operate under.
Speaker 1: That's what I was telling my daughter to She says, well,
Speaker 1: she won't take care of it anyway, And I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's a myth.
Speaker 3: But they tell you that so you.
Speaker 1: Don't mess with stuff, but it's not true. It's just
Speaker 1: the manipulating you into not they're manipulating you into not
Speaker 1: messing with things you shouldn't mess with. Two book thing
Speaker 1: News is one forever for those of you awaiting it.
Speaker 1: Our guide to wilderness skills and survivals out in Japanese.
Speaker 4: How many other languages don't know?
Speaker 1: I'm not sure of any of the life.
Speaker 5: I don't think any other.
Speaker 1: So they usually buy. When they buy, it'll get it'll
Speaker 1: go to like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America. This is
Speaker 1: the only translation I'm aware of.
Speaker 3: But you, being you know, a.
Speaker 2: Little adjacent to.
Speaker 1: You know, here we go significantly Chinese, perhaps you can
Speaker 1: help me with something.
Speaker 4: Yep, there are there are some kanji. Uh, there's there's Yes,
Speaker 4: there are some script characters that are similar. But I
Speaker 4: long long forgot how.
Speaker 3: In China do they read books backwards or forwards?
Speaker 4: So traditionally it's compared to us backwards, and it's not backwards, right,
Speaker 4: it's not backwards to them, and let's be friends.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at this from American right to left.
Speaker 4: If I'm not mistaken, right, I think that's what it
Speaker 4: is traditionally.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's interesting. You already kind of answered my question.
Speaker 1: Traditionally because I have a Japanese fish Cleaning Book, which
Speaker 1: is my favorite book of all the books I've ever owned.
Speaker 1: It's like process descriptions on how to clean all kinds
Speaker 1: of fish. But if you read it the right way,
Speaker 1: the American way, the fish get put back together. So
Speaker 1: you're like, this is a book about resurrecting fish. But
Speaker 1: you're supposed to go back to what would be for us,
Speaker 1: back to front. So when I picked this up, I
Speaker 1: expected it to be that they would have reversed.
Speaker 4: It, but they because it's more modern now.
Speaker 1: So you might if you lived in Japan, you might
Speaker 1: grab a book and you might encounter a book that
Speaker 1: has read from from our perspective, back to front, or
Speaker 1: you might pick up a book that's read front to
Speaker 1: back and it would just be like whatever, You're adaptable
Speaker 1: either way.
Speaker 4: I think I think more. I think books that are
Speaker 4: printed uh these days are just done in the I
Speaker 4: don't know if I mean Western orientation.
Speaker 1: Me and doctor Randall were trying to find the translator online.
Speaker 1: We found her LinkedIn. I couldn't read it being in Japanese,
Speaker 1: just in Japanese. I just wanted to get her impressions.
Speaker 1: I wanted to get her impressions.
Speaker 2: I thought that was a bootleg copy.
Speaker 1: I saw it.
Speaker 6: It's interesting how they put a dust jacket on a paperback.
Speaker 2: I thought that too. I also thought this version was
Speaker 2: prettier than that's a gorgeous cover.
Speaker 4: Yeah what what didn't the American one?
Speaker 7: Americans aren't that.
Speaker 3: Americans aren't that discrete.
Speaker 4: As well, like the the Japanese have this wonderful art
Speaker 4: at packaging things up. So if you if you go
Speaker 4: there and you buy I don't know, cookies, there's a
Speaker 4: problem because there's a ton of waste, but individual cookies
Speaker 4: have their own wrapping and then these wrapped individual cookies
Speaker 4: are in a wrap box maybe with wrapping paper around it,
Speaker 4: as you know, presentation as a reflection of respect and
Speaker 4: of mil and so.
Speaker 1: It's not ell that. It's like it's three times the
Speaker 1: pack international business.
Speaker 4: Yeah, three that's right, that's right. I mean they have
Speaker 4: a huge, like plastic waste problem in Japan, but I'm
Speaker 4: not surprised that there is a cover on a soft bound.
Speaker 1: Book another paper But oh, you know, I had a
Speaker 1: joke I liked a lot and when I put that
Speaker 1: Japanese book on Instagram, and I said, if this book
Speaker 1: would have come out in nineteen forty we'd still be
Speaker 1: fighting in the Pacific.
Speaker 4: That was pretty funny, get it, That's pretty funny.
Speaker 1: This catch our Kids book, Catch Crayfish, Count Stars is
Speaker 1: out in paperback.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 1: So I was saying, if you had a kid that
Speaker 1: you don't like enough for a hardcover, or who's out
Speaker 1: well behaved enough to deserve a hardcover.
Speaker 5: Or if you have a kid that trashed the hardcover.
Speaker 1: Now there's every kid in America should deserve a soft
Speaker 1: cover too.
Speaker 3: Let there's no kids that are that bad.
Speaker 1: Number one New York Times bestseller. This book, Catch Crayfish,
Speaker 1: Count Stars fun projects, skills and adventures for outdoor kids.
Speaker 1: So if you want to raise outdoor competent children who understand,
Speaker 1: as Doug durn puts it, life and death on the
Speaker 1: farm or life and death on the asphalt with bird eggs,
Speaker 1: this is this is a phenomenal book to get your
Speaker 1: kids involved with. It's just projects. There's things they do
Speaker 1: and ways to engage them with discussions about ecology and
Speaker 1: biology and everything outdoors. Yep. May the gold being if
Speaker 1: you see a mouse and you say to your kid,
Speaker 1: grab that, it'll grab it.
Speaker 5: And then ideally turn it loose.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't mean just the fact that they'll, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, that's why I let my kids tell them
Speaker 1: grab my mouse, You're probably gonna grab. It's doing a.
Speaker 5: Lot of spiders.
Speaker 1: We have an Iraq noophobia problem.
Speaker 3: But I've accepted that it's true.
Speaker 1: It's not just I think it's a psychological like. I
Speaker 1: think it's a legitimate psychological thing, the Iraq and noophobia. Now,
Speaker 1: this is harrowing. In Florida, a sixty one year old
Speaker 1: woman and her husband were in a canoe in central Florida.
Speaker 1: They went over they passed over an eleven foot alligator.
Speaker 1: It's it seems like it's spooked and that's the noise
Speaker 1: of it spooking in shallow water, flipped the canoe and
Speaker 1: then decided and then killed the woman Tiger Creek near
Speaker 1: Lake Kassimi, south of Orlando.
Speaker 6: How harrowing be a rough way to go? I think
Speaker 6: be worse than getting eaten by a grizzly.
Speaker 1: Bear her husband? How hairing for her husband? Oh way
Speaker 1: worse than getting killed by grizzly bear. There's just not
Speaker 1: a lot of romance in now.
Speaker 6: No hopefully drowned first, I guess.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Just the question is is.
Speaker 6: Are more people getting killed by alligators these days and
Speaker 6: in days past.
Speaker 1: Well, here's the real question. You're right, but there's a
Speaker 1: way to arrive at that that. I like, I can't
Speaker 1: remember who introduced this idea. Oh, I think it was
Speaker 1: a podcast guest. Remember we had Adam Pancrats on the show,
Speaker 1: and well, there's there's there's so like, so grizzly bears
Speaker 1: dust off, Like, that's that's crass. Grizzly bears kill a
Speaker 1: person or two every year in Montana. Right, So you'd
Speaker 1: look be like, as grizzly bears have recovered and hit
Speaker 1: recovery objectives, and there's like more bears at higher populations,
Speaker 1: you'd be like, are bears more likely to kill a person?
Speaker 1: Be like, well, let's look at what an individual's bear.
Speaker 1: An individual bears chance of having a violent encounter with
Speaker 1: a human.
Speaker 4: We're a run in with a human to begin with,
Speaker 4: and you look at human populations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the thing but what I'm getting at is
Speaker 1: like a bear today, a grizzly today in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana,
Speaker 1: a grizzy today an individual bear is not that bear
Speaker 1: is not more likely to maul a person. No, it's
Speaker 1: not like their psychology has changed. There's more of them. Ye,
Speaker 1: So if you went point me, if you went and
Speaker 1: looked at Florida, like you know, alligators were had endangered
Speaker 1: species protections in the seventies. Now they got one point
Speaker 1: five million.
Speaker 6: Golf course ponds and canals in people's backyards.
Speaker 1: So don't Yeah, it's not like gators are like individual
Speaker 1: gators are like, man, I wouldn't have before, but now
Speaker 1: I'm gonna bite a person. It's just like there's you know,
Speaker 1: so it might even be that alligator, an individual alligator
Speaker 1: still has a point oh whatever percent chance of doing it,
Speaker 1: and an individual alligator is not like more likely to
Speaker 1: attack a person, but you just have more opportunities. But
Speaker 1: still be like, what a couple of people. I don't
Speaker 1: know how many people get attacked every year in Florida.
Speaker 3: Couple die.
Speaker 1: We've talked about a bunch that died, But I mean,
Speaker 1: what is it like five six people per year? That's
Speaker 1: easy in March get bit in Florida. How many people
Speaker 1: get bit in Florida by an alligator? Divided?
Speaker 4: I think Spencer is checking up on that. But in March,
Speaker 4: this same area where this woman got was killed, another
Speaker 4: woman was killed brilliantly. Yeah in March.
Speaker 6: Same Did that one have something to do with a
Speaker 6: dog rescuing a.
Speaker 5: Dog or something?
Speaker 6: Oh, yeah, there's something about a dog.
Speaker 1: Because yeah, eighteen hundred grizzly bears and the lower forty
Speaker 1: eight eighteen hundred grizzly bears kill a couple people a year,
Speaker 1: so and so they're more dangerous per bear than gators.
Speaker 3: If you have one thousand gators.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the other thing is you got tons of
Speaker 1: dinky gators that you can't really count.
Speaker 3: You have to start counting them out a certain size.
Speaker 2: I guess Since nineteen forty eight, there have been four
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty documented alligator bites in Florida. Thirty of
Speaker 2: them were fatal. It's a eighty years seven years span.
Speaker 4: I think we should finally get you on a gator
Speaker 4: hunt for an episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I'd like to. I just never had
Speaker 1: not that I don't want to. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff to do in this life.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of stuff to.
Speaker 1: Do in this life.
Speaker 4: The gator nuggets are really good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've had friends give me sax a gator me.
Speaker 3: I just have never like.
Speaker 1: Planned it, you know what I mean? This got us
Speaker 1: thinking about this. Did you know that there used to
Speaker 1: be it's so crazy and eleven thousand pound alligator?
Speaker 6: You mean used to be like ten years ago, like
Speaker 6: ten million years.
Speaker 1: Ago, seventy eighty million years ago.
Speaker 4: My colossal probably doesn't want to work on this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that one's a little too old. It's old.
Speaker 1: Six to eight foot long, teeth.
Speaker 4: Six to eight inch long?
Speaker 1: What am I saying that would be? But do you
Speaker 1: maybe mean inches? Yeah? Yeah, that's right, six to eight
Speaker 1: inch teeth. There's a picture of one eating. There's like
Speaker 1: a like a fanciful.
Speaker 4: Painting of an artist rendering.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but it's like it's not an actual photo.
Speaker 3: R a t rex, which I love.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: But you can't rule out an eleven thousand pounder.
Speaker 1: Uh. They found the bones from one in North Carolina
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty how long, I don't know.
Speaker 7: I mean, that's an alligator the size of an orca
Speaker 7: gown with.
Speaker 1: Your kid, and they nudging up to the edge of
Speaker 1: the pond.
Speaker 5: And the head would be the size of this table.
Speaker 4: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3: You'd seen him from so far away.
Speaker 1: That's the thing I think about with dinosaurs is like,
Speaker 1: what's that big ass dinosaur, the big plant eater. If
Speaker 1: you're driving down the road, you'd be like, hey, look,
Speaker 1: five miles away, there's one.
Speaker 3: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: It'd be so obvious. Uh quick? How many other news
Speaker 1: items we get?
Speaker 7: It's even bigger than an orca.
Speaker 1: This is an interesting deal because we had a wildlife
Speaker 1: We had a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service agent
Speaker 1: on the show not long ago talking about the smuggling
Speaker 1: of wildlife parts, and there's this is reported that there
Speaker 1: has been a post COVID decline in the smuggling of
Speaker 1: panglin scales and elephant ivory, related to a Chinese encyclopedia
Speaker 1: of medicine having said perhaps there is no health benefit
Speaker 1: to panglin scales, I love it and ivory.
Speaker 5: How was the eye every tied to medicine?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: And I feel like the black market is always operated
Speaker 2: outside of what traditional medicine would say is useful for
Speaker 2: curing or doing something. So I can't believe that, like
Speaker 2: they're attributing this to an official journal saying, hey, penguins
Speaker 2: don't help your libido or whatever.
Speaker 1: In twenty nineteen, smugglers crime syndicates were shipping vast quantities
Speaker 1: of the two products from Africa into China. Says trafficking
Speaker 1: fell during the pandemic has remained low. Law enforcement efforts
Speaker 1: have helped. Falling prices have helped, and it goes on
Speaker 1: to say another possible factor is that in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: Panglin scales were removed from an important encyclopedia of Chinese medicine.
Speaker 6: We found out why.
Speaker 4: Ivory quote ivory can purge the body of toxins and
Speaker 4: enhance the complexion.
Speaker 6: Sure, now do you just like rub a piece of
Speaker 6: ivory on your face?
Speaker 4: I think you grind didn't eat it? You know, obviously
Speaker 4: not backed by science, but that's the.
Speaker 1: My wife was getting off her toxins out last week,
Speaker 1: she did a cleanse, and I was like, what toxins specifically,
Speaker 1: the same way anybody answers it. They don't know what?
Speaker 1: Tell me what toxins are coming out of you?
Speaker 4: Pepass which we can't get out of us.
Speaker 3: I had a social media hissy fit.
Speaker 1: When and when uh, the Trump administration canceled some federal
Speaker 1: spending on the lamp ray problem in the Great Lakes,
Speaker 1: which I thought was a huge mistake and perhaps quite
Speaker 1: expensive in the long run, and better news they're following
Speaker 1: through now with trying to keep big head carp, silver carp,
Speaker 1: the asiatic carp species out of the Great Lakes, And
Speaker 1: in fact, which surprised me, is they've now working with
Speaker 1: Michigan's Governor Jennifer Whitner. Whitmer, the administration is fast tracking
Speaker 1: a barrier system to keep carp going through the Chicago
Speaker 1: Canal and into the Great Lakes. There's often there's also
Speaker 1: been a big argument among ecologists and fisheries people is
Speaker 1: would those carp even like the Great Lakes anyways?
Speaker 2: Do?
Speaker 5: I mean?
Speaker 6: The current thinking the only way to figure that out
Speaker 6: is let them get in there, right, Like what you don't?
Speaker 6: I mean, that could be devastating to the Great Lakes.
Speaker 1: The current thinking is they would. Because some people said that,
Speaker 1: well they probably wouldn't like it. The current thinking is
Speaker 1: that they would like it and that it would be devastating.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Well, the problem with carpe is they seem to
Speaker 7: like almost everybody at water they've ever been in.
Speaker 1: I liked everything. Yeah, all right, we're gonna do a
Speaker 1: little background on dire wolves here.
Speaker 2: You mentioned Game of Thrones twice earlier. Have you seen
Speaker 2: Game of Throne.
Speaker 3: Never I'm aware of it, have you?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: But I wanted your review on it.
Speaker 1: Never watched it, Okay, I watched serial drama like it.
Speaker 1: I don't watch serial dramas. I wouldn't like.
Speaker 4: Did you watch Narcos?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: Wait, Narcos?
Speaker 1: And then what's that?
Speaker 4: There wasn't there a Danish serial dramas.
Speaker 5: Fantasy stuff other than Star Wars.
Speaker 1: A little bit of Star the Star Wars guy, a
Speaker 1: little bit of Star Wars guy. I don't watch serial
Speaker 1: dramas because I don't with the exception of what did
Speaker 1: you just name that?
Speaker 4: I did watch Danish drama and.
Speaker 1: There's no date yet, okay, d Narcos, Yes, that's it.
Speaker 4: Oh there's another one, push your one, Pushura or something.
Speaker 4: An Italian an Italian series. I did watch that, Tina.
Speaker 1: No Gomora well, because Gomora was a book, was a
Speaker 1: nonfiction book about the Italian mafiosa. Out of that came
Speaker 1: a film called Gomorra, which was a devastating film about
Speaker 1: the Italian mafia. And then out of that so I
Speaker 1: watched because I was liking Gomore of the book, Gamore
Speaker 1: of the movie. I watched some of the Gomora the series.
Speaker 1: What I not that it matters. What I don't like
Speaker 1: about serial dramas is after a while, I want to
Speaker 1: get out with my life.
Speaker 4: Did you watch Breaking Bad?
Speaker 1: Can you?
Speaker 2: I've got the top five here. See if you've seen
Speaker 2: any TV dramas of all time from the University of
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania and the Sopranos. No The Wire, no Breaking Bad,
Speaker 2: Mad Men, no Game of Thrones. Okay five, I trust
Speaker 2: you now.
Speaker 3: I'm not hacking on it.
Speaker 2: I just can't sure.
Speaker 1: I need to move on, like I can't give you
Speaker 1: know me movies.
Speaker 3: I could have watched in that amount of time and
Speaker 3: then I could start.
Speaker 1: Here's the other problem I have, and I don't want
Speaker 1: to take up too much of our time. Here I
Speaker 1: can start to smell the writers keeping it going. The
Speaker 1: minute I get a whiff of them keeping it going,
Speaker 1: getting extra season or two of yeah it is, Oh brother,
Speaker 1: you know you can just smell them keeping it jump
Speaker 1: the shark. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 7: The good news about Game of Thrones is it wasn't
Speaker 7: that they were struggling to keep it going as they
Speaker 7: were struggling to condense it into what they did. Oh,
Speaker 7: because the books are just so the books kept it
Speaker 7: going for them.
Speaker 1: Oh, interesting thing here just about wolves in general. So
Speaker 1: the two dire wolves were going to discuss today are
Speaker 1: Romulus were named Romulus and Remus, which are fitting for
Speaker 1: wolf names because Romulus killed his brother.
Speaker 3: Was that part of your thinking, Well, we were.
Speaker 1: Hoping nobody wolves are hipped to frat.
Speaker 7: Sorry, yeah, exactly, it was fitting and plus the you
Speaker 7: know race by a she wolf and h.
Speaker 1: There's a statue in in sus Saint Marie Michigan of
Speaker 1: Romulus and Remus suckling from the mother's the wolves teats.
Speaker 4: Ye, do you feel like rolling pictures for the video audiences.
Speaker 3: There on the little.
Speaker 4: You want to start with the then adults? I mean
Speaker 4: they're now what Matt, you said, seven.
Speaker 7: And a half at seven point five months old, and
Speaker 7: they're tipping the scales nearly your past.
Speaker 4: Their little white fluffy pops.
Speaker 1: Cute. Uh let me let me kick off a little bit.
Speaker 1: Despite characters like that Game of Thrones are supposed to
Speaker 1: be up north, right, it is a fictional Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like show in Canada.
Speaker 5: It's a whole world. So there's like up north stuff and.
Speaker 2: Down the family associated with dire Wolves. They're in the north.
Speaker 1: Yes, despite because in my thing I have here. I
Speaker 1: wrote this like, despite characteristics otherwise, dire wolves were Southern animals.
Speaker 1: They ranged throughout the lower forty eight. They liked the
Speaker 1: south and the hot so much that four thousand died
Speaker 1: in La Have I told my story eighteen times about
Speaker 1: my first date with my wife twenty Okay, yeah, at
Speaker 1: least there were dire wolves in Mexico. There were dire
Speaker 1: wolves in South America. I think there's one instance of
Speaker 1: a dire wolf showing up in extreme southern Canada. A
Speaker 1: way to think about it, which I realized looking at maps.
Speaker 1: If you look where turkeys are, that's where dire wolves were.
Speaker 1: Little teeny bit in Toronto, like a little teeny bit
Speaker 1: in Ontario.
Speaker 2: The National Park Service says they were found as far
Speaker 2: north as Alaska.
Speaker 1: That's not true.
Speaker 2: I'm just telling you what the National Park Service says.
Speaker 1: We've debated that and we haven't even talked about it
Speaker 1: with our multiple people.
Speaker 2: But the one guy who debated it said that they
Speaker 2: weren't found at the Lebrea tar pits.
Speaker 1: Who said that Angela Perry.
Speaker 2: No, he was an older fella, got it got mildly
Speaker 2: uncomfortable because I was like, no, I've I've seen him there.
Speaker 3: We talked about that with the old person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we didn't, and we did. I could probably find it's.
Speaker 1: Not talking about the guy that fishes muskies all the time.
Speaker 2: When we can come back to this.
Speaker 3: I think you're I think you're talking about a dream sequence.
Speaker 7: They're definitely in lebre A lot of them, A lot
Speaker 7: of them.
Speaker 3: I have to tell my story about my first date and.
Speaker 1: My wife all over.
Speaker 2: I know, I know.
Speaker 4: Oh, do you mean seem to have like Jack Carr? No,
Speaker 4: I'm not, Jack said not. Sorry, we can visit this.
Speaker 2: I will find it.
Speaker 5: We know there'ner.
Speaker 1: No Jack Corner. He was on the show Big Dinosaur Guy.
Speaker 1: Spencer was talking about.
Speaker 4: John Corner is composed.
Speaker 1: They seem to have like water Florida and Texas has
Speaker 1: a dire wolf. I don't believe we have good archaeological
Speaker 1: sites showing humans and dire wolves together. How do you
Speaker 1: feel about that statement, Matt.
Speaker 7: I think that's directionally accurate.
Speaker 1: If you took a dire wolf skull and a gray
Speaker 1: wolf skull and you take fifteen measurements on it, this
Speaker 1: is a good little tidbit. Four of those measurements are different.
Speaker 1: I'd like to know what a black bear and a
Speaker 1: grizzly bear. How many measurements are different on their skulls.
Speaker 1: So if you take like somehow like you're doing like
Speaker 1: skull morphology, they have four differences wider, wider, and burlier
Speaker 1: than a gray wolf. Colossal says that ninety nine point
Speaker 1: five percent similarity between a gray wolf and a dire wolf,
Speaker 1: which always sounds like a lot until you think about
Speaker 1: some other things. They say, we have sixty percent. We
Speaker 1: humans have sixty percent genetic similarity with a carrot.
Speaker 3: In this world.
Speaker 1: What I'm pointing out is in this world little do
Speaker 1: you know what I mean? Like in this world, little
Speaker 1: things get different. I mean, like the differences of when
Speaker 1: you start talking about these like numbers, what you're arguing
Speaker 1: about is what comes after the last decimal point.
Speaker 7: And we're talking about billions of base pairs in the genome. Okay, right,
Speaker 7: So when you say ninety nine point five percent, you're
Speaker 7: still looking at point five percent of three billion base pairs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot, but I mean like hearing it in
Speaker 1: the percentage thing that gives you like a different idea.
Speaker 7: And the percentage thing can be is one way to
Speaker 7: explain it is a hard way to conceptualize it, because
Speaker 7: at the same time, you could say African elephant and
Speaker 7: an Asian elephant are early ninety eight percent similar.
Speaker 1: Oh well, because I was just going to point out
Speaker 1: that according and people debate these counts humans and chimpanzees
Speaker 1: ninety eight point eight percent similar m.
Speaker 7: And I think an important part of to remember when
Speaker 7: we talk about percentages of genome is what part of
Speaker 7: the genome is coding for very specific traits that end
Speaker 7: up expressing as differences between us and a chimpanzee size, strength,
Speaker 7: you know, musculature, hair, some pretty significant differences, so that
Speaker 7: that doesn't require a huge piece of the genome to
Speaker 7: make those changes. A lot of the genome actually doesn't
Speaker 7: code for anything. It's just sort of, you know, it's
Speaker 7: what we call non coding regions that we don't fully understand.
Speaker 3: That's the part that's the part.
Speaker 1: Of this that puzzles me that I don't get, And
Speaker 1: that's probably why you can't look up how much genetic
Speaker 1: similarity do we have with carrots, which I was doing
Speaker 1: because it's like a lot of people areaying that's not
Speaker 1: really a good way of looking at it.
Speaker 7: I've seen a few people that look like a carrot was.
Speaker 7: Do you know.
Speaker 4: The form of former his genetics similarity might be like
Speaker 4: sixty one percent sixty.
Speaker 1: Okay, explain that point five percent? Like it like to you, Matt,
Speaker 1: explain that if there's a gray wolf and a dire wolf,
Speaker 1: and it seems like a gray wolf and a dire
Speaker 1: wolf for ninety nine point five percent similar, what is
Speaker 1: the point five and is it accurate to go and
Speaker 1: look and say, like, I'll think about this with chimpanzees,
Speaker 1: just to set up the question a little more specifically,
Speaker 1: because everybody knows humans because you're one, we're all one,
Speaker 1: and we know chimps because we've been watching nature documentaries
Speaker 1: for a long time. So if humans and chimps are
Speaker 1: ninety eight point eight percent similar, is it fair to
Speaker 1: say two hundred and forty genes separate us from chimps?
Speaker 3: Or is that a dumb way to look at it?
Speaker 7: I mean, we're waiting into dangerous territory. Because I'm more
Speaker 7: a conservation guy than a geneticist. I just play a
Speaker 7: geneticis at back home, right. I work with really some
Speaker 7: people like Beth who really explain these things really well.
Speaker 7: But yes, I think it would be an oversimplification to
Speaker 7: say two hundred and forty genes separate us from a chimpanzee.
Speaker 7: Yeah that said, I mean when we talk about the
Speaker 7: differences between dire wolves and gray wolves, well, we're really
Speaker 7: looking for what are the core you know types, What
Speaker 7: are those key areas of the genome in that point
Speaker 7: five percent that we need to target in order to
Speaker 7: confer the difference the primary difference, which is, like you said,
Speaker 7: you know, sort of a robustness of a size, a musculature,
Speaker 7: a hair difference, a coat difference that we've identified. And
Speaker 7: how can we then identify those within that point five
Speaker 7: percent and pick the few most impactful changes.
Speaker 1: How do you decide look at.
Speaker 3: Let's look at color? Why white?
Speaker 7: So if you look at the genome of the dire wolf.
Speaker 7: And this is a really great question and one that
Speaker 7: kind of goes back to know when you talk about
Speaker 7: having doctor Perry on earlier. Doctor Perry was part of
Speaker 7: a paper that came out of twenty twenty one along
Speaker 7: with Best Shapiro or chief scientist, who sequenced the genome
Speaker 7: of the direwolf, and they only got what we would
Speaker 7: say is about a zero point two five percent cover
Speaker 7: or point twenty five x coverage, so sort of on average,
Speaker 7: they were able to sequence a quarter of the genome
Speaker 7: one time, so not a lot of data. We went
Speaker 7: back and we started and found two samples of dire
Speaker 7: wolf specimens that we were able to sample and sequence
Speaker 7: their DNA, one from a seventy two thousand year old
Speaker 7: skull and another from a from a thirteen thousand year
Speaker 7: old tooth. We ended up producing what we would call
Speaker 7: thirteen x coverage, so on average we sequenced every base
Speaker 7: pair in that genome about thirteen times, so that gives
Speaker 7: us a really robust data set as compared to the
Speaker 7: twenty twenty one paper. What we identified when we have
Speaker 7: this new robust data set is that they're between these
Speaker 7: two investments that one was from Idaho, one from Ohio,
Speaker 7: one from seventy two thousand years old, and one that's
Speaker 7: thirteen thousand years old. Both code for the same light
Speaker 7: coat color, not necessarily stark white like what we ended
Speaker 7: up getting, but they could have and we don't know that.
Speaker 1: But did you guys tweak it to make it white? No,
Speaker 1: So it's because it's like such a wild I mean,
Speaker 1: you have to admit, like the Game of Thrones thing
Speaker 1: and people like the writer is involved with you guys,
Speaker 1: like he makes them white.
Speaker 7: Yep, well he made one of them white.
Speaker 3: Like for the show.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's five of them that are sort of characters
Speaker 7: in that show. Only one of them is white. The
Speaker 7: other have very typical morph I'm sorry, wolf or coat colors.
Speaker 1: So but when it was born, you didn't know what
Speaker 1: color would be, knew it?
Speaker 7: Okay, Yeah, we already knew because we had made that change.
Speaker 1: So so you had like purposefully made it white.
Speaker 7: Yes, Okay, So when we identified that definitely over this
Speaker 7: sixty thousand years of divergence and this huge geographic distribution
Speaker 7: between Ohio and Idaho, both animals coated for a very
Speaker 7: light colored coat as compared to what we would have
Speaker 7: seen in a gray wolf.
Speaker 3: Like perhaps it was like kyot colored.
Speaker 7: Could have been. Yeah, it could have been where it
Speaker 7: could be even lighter like this white we saw.
Speaker 3: We said, mountain pale if you look over your shoulder.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean that could certainly be it, or it
Speaker 7: could be white. You know, there there are reasons for that,
Speaker 7: that white coat that could have persisted. But since we
Speaker 7: saw this common trait between across space and time and
Speaker 7: these two specimens We said, well, that's certainly interesting. We
Speaker 7: only have two sequences, so that means one hundred percent
Speaker 7: of what we sampled, you know, had this coat color.
Speaker 7: So we said, well we should code for that. The
Speaker 7: trick there is that we also identified very close to
Speaker 7: that gene and what we had seen if you use
Speaker 7: the genetic background of a wolf, wolfs that have that
Speaker 7: same mutation also often can have an issue with deafness
Speaker 7: or blindness. So we said, well, we don't want to
Speaker 7: use the exact variant from the dire wolf genome that
Speaker 7: we sequence because it could confer a deafness or blindness issue.
Speaker 1: Can you explain that more? I don't understand. I don't
Speaker 1: don't have the background to understand what you mean.
Speaker 7: The dire wolf had this specific trait. We know when
Speaker 7: we've seen that trait in the in a gray wolf,
Speaker 7: like did it a naturally occur? It isn't naturally occurring.
Speaker 7: It would be closely associated with.
Speaker 6: So like a white gray wolf would be more likely to.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly have that those issues. So we made a decision.
Speaker 1: We said, well, so that's that's not something that was
Speaker 1: found out. That's not something that people found out by
Speaker 1: trying to insert that into.
Speaker 7: Now that's just from people that had studied Kana genetics
Speaker 7: across Yeah, across that.
Speaker 1: I didn't understand. I was like, because I was like,
Speaker 1: that would be a lot of experimentation to real exactly.
Speaker 7: So our computational team is able to sort of run
Speaker 7: these simulations that tell us what they think the gene
Speaker 7: will code for, what it could also be associated with.
Speaker 7: What could be an off target effect if you made
Speaker 7: that edit and you know it had an unintended consequence.
Speaker 7: So we elected. You'll you'll see in our press release
Speaker 7: or in our news we talked about we made twenty
Speaker 7: edits across fifteen genes with fifteen specific diabolf variants. I mean,
Speaker 7: there are five variants that we edited for that were
Speaker 7: not actually dire wolf. What we did is we went
Speaker 7: and found analogous genes in closely related species. In the
Speaker 7: case of the white coat, it was from domestic dogs.
Speaker 7: We chose that specifically because we wanted to confer the
Speaker 7: coat phenotype without risking welfare of the animal. So we
Speaker 7: made a decision that said the safest way in order
Speaker 7: to do this functional the extinction project we were working
Speaker 7: on without risking the animal's health or welfare was took
Speaker 7: it from a dog exactly. So that's why you know,
Speaker 7: people go is it one hundred percent? Direbolf when you go, well,
Speaker 7: number one, this whole hundred percent thing we just talked
Speaker 7: about percentages of relatedness. It's kind of hard, it's not
Speaker 7: a very clean way to explain it. On hundred percent
Speaker 7: is kind of a bullshit argument.
Speaker 1: But it's why is that not a good way looking
Speaker 1: at it?
Speaker 7: Well, just the variation between two individuals like you and
Speaker 7: I have a significant variation. We're not one hundred percent identical.
Speaker 7: So if aliens came and abducted you and I, right,
Speaker 7: they would not then go and clone a human and
Speaker 7: make current right. They would say, well, all humans look
Speaker 7: like you and I. Well, we know that we represent
Speaker 7: a very small portion of the genetic variability across the globe.
Speaker 1: The one's got an honorary doctorate.
Speaker 7: That's coded in there, I'm sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so did.
Speaker 1: You probably have a legit one right?
Speaker 7: Not a doctor? No. I stopped at the master's level
Speaker 7: and said this isn't for me. Yeah, So we we
Speaker 7: tried to avoid this one hundred percent because that's really cloning, right,
Speaker 7: We're not creating the identical individual we sequenced.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I think this is the thing that people
Speaker 1: don't understand and it's hard for me to understand, is
Speaker 1: that there's an idea from watching like Jurassic Park or whatever,
Speaker 1: that you're able to pluck some living thing out of
Speaker 1: a dire wolf bone and like add it into something.
Speaker 1: It's more like you're looking at trying to think of
Speaker 1: it like a I shouldn't do an analogy, but it's
Speaker 1: like you're you're looking at a someone's got a paint
Speaker 1: sample and you're like, oh, I could make something that color.
Speaker 1: I don't know how they made that that color, but
Speaker 1: I could make something that color, right, yep. And in
Speaker 1: the end I'd look and be like, wow, that is
Speaker 1: that kind of same color, but it might have different
Speaker 1: constituent parts exactly. Is that a good analogy?
Speaker 7: I think that's pretty good analogy. I might use it
Speaker 7: later too. It's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me refine it for a day.
Speaker 5: A doctor should have a more refined The way I.
Speaker 7: Think about it is when we seek it's ancient DNA,
Speaker 7: which is what best specialty is. Right when we go in,
Speaker 7: what we're really sequencing is we're pulling out like a
Speaker 7: two billion piece puzzle from that specimen. The DNA has
Speaker 7: been fragmented over time and time, and you know, things
Speaker 7: have been introduced like bacteria that chop up DNA into
Speaker 7: small pieces. All we get out is we're able to
Speaker 7: sequence all that, and we get these two billion puzzle
Speaker 7: pieces and we have to figure out how to put
Speaker 7: them back together. But we don't have the reference on
Speaker 7: the cover of the puzzle, right, so we have to
Speaker 7: use artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms in order to help
Speaker 7: tell us how to do that. We also have to
Speaker 7: align it to a close living relative, so then we go, well,
Speaker 7: we know a dire wolf was sort of like a
Speaker 7: gray wolf, so we can start building towards a gray wolf.
Speaker 7: Then there are specific parts that we go, well, we
Speaker 7: know it wasn't totally gray wolf, so we have to
Speaker 7: start making educated decisions. Here almost guesses as to what
Speaker 7: puzzle piece goes where, and so that's when you won't
Speaker 7: end up with one hundred percent accurate representation of the
Speaker 7: animal you sequence. Because there was non viable DNA in there,
Speaker 7: you can't clone it. And now we're trying to put
Speaker 7: something back together without a clear picture of what it
Speaker 7: should have been.
Speaker 1: So let me hate you with this one. Let's say
Speaker 1: you took one of you took one of your animals
Speaker 1: Romulus or Remus, and you uh have them forbid something
Speaker 1: were to happen to it, and you boiled its skull
Speaker 1: down and cleaned it up and threw it into.
Speaker 3: A pile of la Brea tar pits.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then there's the person there sorting skulls.
Speaker 1: What do you think the likelihood is that they would
Speaker 1: grab that skull and they would throw in the dire
Speaker 1: wolf pile.
Speaker 7: That's a good question. I haven't thought about it that way.
Speaker 7: I would do it in a much less uh fatalistic way.
Speaker 7: I would. We can use uh you know, high tech
Speaker 7: CT image in an actually three D print their skeleton,
Speaker 7: which is one of the things we will be doing
Speaker 7: is as a mature as they kind of come into
Speaker 7: their full size, we're using CT imaging in order to
Speaker 7: kind of get a clear picture of morphology from a skeleton.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're gonna like you mentioned that, we know, like
Speaker 6: there's four skull measurements that are different, Like did you
Speaker 6: build that into these?
Speaker 7: Yeah? The diurbl farians we picked were specific to changes
Speaker 7: that we knew would be associated with those few morphological
Speaker 7: differences between the species, so you could.
Speaker 1: You were you looked in at like what is with
Speaker 1: the wide skull, the strong skull, or whatever you put it.
Speaker 1: You know, we're talking about dogs, mingol this is one
Speaker 1: and reading all the coverage about your projects, why did
Speaker 1: the dogs get Why did the dog that birth?
Speaker 3: Why was it a cesarean section?
Speaker 7: Well, so it's a good question. I So one of
Speaker 7: the things we did is while we were starting this project, I,
Speaker 7: me and my team we put together this one hundred
Speaker 7: and sixty page document that is the Animal Care Manual
Speaker 7: of the Direwolf. Right, so we wrote an animal care
Speaker 7: and management manual for species that nobody's ever worked with.
Speaker 7: That's twelve thousand years extinct, super fun project. In there,
Speaker 7: we had very specific uh protocols for how would we
Speaker 7: birth this animal. Well, one of the fears was is
Speaker 7: we don't know the fetal development rate and the size
Speaker 7: of a newborn dire wolf. So we had one contingency
Speaker 7: was cesarean section. The other plan was natural birth. As
Speaker 7: we got closer, we were taking skull measurements via ultrasound
Speaker 7: and comparing that to the pelvic opening of our surrogate.
Speaker 7: Turns out would have been totally fine. We could have
Speaker 7: passed those those pups naturally. That however, day sixty two
Speaker 7: was sort of our cutoff. We said, if she doesn't
Speaker 7: give birth by six day sixty two, they're gestations about
Speaker 7: sixty to sixty three days. But using cloning technology, usually
Speaker 7: you're a day or two ahead, right because the embryo
Speaker 7: has developed in vitro before you've transferred it, So say
Speaker 7: day sixty two might be more like day sixty four,
Speaker 7: day sixty five. So we just had just like most humans,
Speaker 7: sort of their doctor, if they're pregnant, will tell them, hey,
Speaker 7: if you don't give birth by this date, we will
Speaker 7: induce you. Well, we don't really do inductions with dogs.
Speaker 7: The safest way to remove all the variables was just
Speaker 7: a cesarean section, and it's a very common procedure dogs,
Speaker 7: and we have you know, we had an amazing team
Speaker 7: of surgeons that were able to do it, and you know,
Speaker 7: I think the results speak for themselves. We remove those variables,
Speaker 7: we give health, give birth to two healthy puppies, a
Speaker 7: third on a second litter, and then and then all
Speaker 7: the moms you know, ended up great and now they're
Speaker 7: in their forever homes, you know, living life and.
Speaker 6: When you say a second litter, like did you was
Speaker 6: there only two puppies in? Like you weren't trying to
Speaker 6: grow six of them?
Speaker 7: It was like, well read, embryology is the numbers game.
Speaker 7: If you've you know, know anybody it's gone through IVF,
Speaker 7: you know years ago that used to put multiple embryos
Speaker 7: into into a mom. The same idea with us is
Speaker 7: when we're transferring embryos into a surrogate, we're transferring, you know,
Speaker 7: twenty five embryos understanding that only two to six of
Speaker 7: those would take, and in our case we got two
Speaker 7: of them. We had another female that was had was
Speaker 7: pregnant with a second letter and that's where Callisi, our third,
Speaker 7: our female dire wolf was born in January. She actually
Speaker 7: had a second puppy that she was born with. That
Speaker 7: puppy unfortunately pass away in day ten of antritis, so
Speaker 7: basically a perforated gut, and she got septically ill, which
Speaker 7: is you know, we did a lot of looking and
Speaker 7: we were able to determine it wasn't related to any
Speaker 7: sort of effects of editing or cloning. It was sort
Speaker 7: of an unfortunate event of puppy development that we see,
Speaker 7: you know, a certain level of mortality. So that's how
Speaker 7: we got to three. We originally thought we were going
Speaker 7: to have four.
Speaker 2: Will the dire wolves be fertile?
Speaker 7: Yes, yeah, they would, They would be very fertile. We
Speaker 7: have specific strategies we can deploy in order to ensure
Speaker 7: that they would only breed when we intend to breed.
Speaker 7: Right now, our interest is not in breeding at the moment,
Speaker 7: but we could use things like contraceptive strategies or reproductive
Speaker 7: management of you know, time in when the female is
Speaker 7: with the pack or outside of the pack.
Speaker 2: Can you give us some other examples of things that
Speaker 2: are in this manual for raising a dire wolf? And
Speaker 2: how do I get my hands on one?
Speaker 7: The manual or the dire the manual?
Speaker 2: I'm ment well both, but I'm I'm let's settle for
Speaker 2: a manual.
Speaker 7: The really cool thing is we published the manuals on
Speaker 7: our website. So if you go to the fossil dot
Speaker 7: com fors dire Well f you'll see there is a
Speaker 7: downloadable animal care manual there. So it's everything from the
Speaker 7: partuition issues. So how do you take care of a
Speaker 7: of a whelping litter of puppies to how do we
Speaker 7: manage them socially as they grow up. What is the
Speaker 7: diet that they should be eating as they grow, What
Speaker 7: are the expected milestones developmental milestones. These are things we're
Speaker 7: sort of extrapolating from our worked with gray wolves and
Speaker 7: other wild canids.
Speaker 3: Who nursed them. The dog didn't nurse them.
Speaker 7: So the dog did nurse them for the first few days,
Speaker 7: and so Romulus and Remus there surrogate was a very
Speaker 7: attentive mother, and she got to be so attentive that
Speaker 7: she If you've ever had puppies with a mom, sometimes
Speaker 7: they get to be a little nervous and they pick
Speaker 7: them up and they just poke them too much and
Speaker 7: starts to interrupt their feeding and sleeping cycles. So we
Speaker 7: just said, you know, it's similar to the precautionary approach
Speaker 7: we took with cesarean section. We said, we're gonna pull
Speaker 7: them and we're gonna hand rear them on bottles. So
Speaker 7: on day three we ended up pulling them.
Speaker 1: Where's that dog. Now, that'd be a valuable dog.
Speaker 7: It's a very valuable dog. And it was sort of.
Speaker 3: Become a famous little like a famous little donor dog.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we did this We worked with the American Humane Society,
Speaker 7: is sort of the oldest global welfare society in the world.
Speaker 7: We worked through them to do a double blind adoption,
Speaker 7: so they vetted a home for them.
Speaker 3: Whoever has it doesn't know.
Speaker 1: They has no.
Speaker 7: Idea what that whoa They don't know correct, nobody knows.
Speaker 7: I don't know where they are and the home doesn't know.
Speaker 1: Someday, that dog this is gonna do like a lot
Speaker 1: of people do, where they start getting like I need
Speaker 1: to find on my real parent. It's gonna look for
Speaker 1: its incredible Disney movie. It's trying to find its children.
Speaker 1: I'll be quite surprised when it finds them. You're so
Speaker 1: big and white. What kind of dog was this?
Speaker 3: You probably want to.
Speaker 1: Say, this is give it up. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 7: It was. It was a mutt, right, it was. It was.
Speaker 7: It was a large hound that was mixed with a lot.
Speaker 1: Of other rough big.
Speaker 7: Somewhere between forty and seventy pounds.
Speaker 3: Okay, you know.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're in a color you recently
Speaker 1: got a dog. It's forty to seventy pounds.
Speaker 7: I should have adopted the dog, like in Australia or
Speaker 7: something where they would.
Speaker 1: They'll never put together. Yeah, I know, it would be
Speaker 1: like a real it's a little science project. Huh. So
Speaker 1: that's what happened to it.
Speaker 5: What do you feeding those things?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 5: They're six months old?
Speaker 7: So they started on a very typical milk replacer formula
Speaker 7: once we pulled them from mom, and then we started
Speaker 7: introducing ground meats, like really slurried meats, until they eventually
Speaker 7: startied in ground meats mostly beef and horse meat. Raw meat, yeah,
Speaker 7: rob me. And then we also had some dry kibble
Speaker 7: in there, you know, essential nutrients things that like that
Speaker 7: for development. Now that you know they're almost eight months old,
Speaker 7: we're they're they've transitioned from that sort of ground meat
Speaker 7: to whole prey item. So I get a whole rabbit,
Speaker 7: a whole chicken, they'll get a quarter of a deer,
Speaker 7: things like that. So we're starting to get them away
Speaker 7: from the two square meals a day to a sort
Speaker 7: of a gorge and fast more similar to a wild
Speaker 7: cadence of feeding.
Speaker 6: Are they in like a big outdoor enclosure?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 7: So I heard a rumor where it is. Oh you did, Yeah,
Speaker 7: that should be good.
Speaker 4: Wait are you letting out private? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Okay, I'll tell private because it might be accurate.
Speaker 3: I just heard and I was like.
Speaker 1: Really, oh that would be good.
Speaker 7: I want to hear that off.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what what I'll tell you what I heard.
Speaker 7: I will tell you they are in the northern continental
Speaker 7: United States. They live on about two thousand acres of
Speaker 7: a wildlife preserve.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah that fits.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we might be we might have to go, you know,
Speaker 7: snuff somebody out if they're telling our secrets. The real
Speaker 7: reason behind the secrecy is there. Did you guys see
Speaker 7: that we came out with this news about a month
Speaker 7: before dire Wolf that we made a wooly mouse. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I saw this. Kind of a silly thing, but a
Speaker 7: lot of fun. The idea was this was like a
Speaker 7: phenotype validation study. We were taking traits we knew existed
Speaker 7: in wooly mammoths and that we're targets for us to
Speaker 7: edit into wooly mammoth. But we wanted to say, oh,
Speaker 7: these edits are having the intended effect, So we didn't
Speaker 7: take the same wooly mammoth edit and edit that into
Speaker 7: a mouse. That just wouldn't work. We found the analogous
Speaker 7: genes in mice and conferred those changes and we made
Speaker 7: these little wooly mice. The idea that it showed that
Speaker 7: they had the same effects on coat length, coat color
Speaker 7: at a post tissue. Things like that that would be
Speaker 7: important to make an Asian elephant a wooly mammoth. We
Speaker 7: came out that news and I thought, I can't believe
Speaker 7: we're going to go public with this thing. And it
Speaker 7: broke the Internet and people just started showing up at
Speaker 7: our front door of our office building, not where the
Speaker 7: mice are.
Speaker 1: One.
Speaker 7: They wanted one, They wanted to see one. They wanted
Speaker 7: to talk to the people that did that. So we
Speaker 7: quickly said, well, this was a month before launch a direwolf.
Speaker 7: We knew we were about to launch a direwolf. We said,
Speaker 7: there's no way we could tell anybody even what state
Speaker 7: these animals are in, because suddenly people will be showing
Speaker 7: up and two thousand acres is a lot to protect.
Speaker 1: So if they're on two thousand acres, they there's no
Speaker 1: way you have a two thousand acre parcel that's free
Speaker 1: of other animals.
Speaker 7: No, yeah, it's so.
Speaker 1: Are they hunting whatever's on this two thousand acres.
Speaker 7: And they're fed so regularly it's like a zoo animal.
Speaker 1: But they're interacting. They're interacting with wildlife.
Speaker 7: I've seen them chase deer off things like that, so
Speaker 7: they definitely have that instinct and they're interested in it.
Speaker 7: But yeah, they also don't have some adult wolf that's
Speaker 7: showing this is how we sort of stalk a prey
Speaker 7: and then we get on it and this is the
Speaker 7: kill move. They don't have that yet. We could, over
Speaker 7: time and over generations do that similar to what they
Speaker 7: do with Mexican gray wolves and red wolves in terms
Speaker 7: of preparing them for introduction to the wild.
Speaker 6: And ye aren't you worried that like they could pick
Speaker 6: up like canine distemper or some disease from a wild canine.
Speaker 7: So we were pretty meticulous in our site selection process
Speaker 7: and one of the things we wanted to ensure was
Speaker 7: that it was an area that you know, gray wolves
Speaker 7: had been extirpated from, so there wasn't a potential issue there. Obviously,
Speaker 7: there's still coyotes in those areas, so we have to
Speaker 7: worry about that. We have coyote pre fencing, but coyotes
Speaker 7: are pretty widely they can get through some of that.
Speaker 1: So you got two thousand acres with no coyote on it.
Speaker 1: There's gonna be some people to want to talk.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, but you know they undergo a pretty typical vaccination, right,
Speaker 7: and similar to what we would do with other animals.
Speaker 2: I'm looking at the care program milestone. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of things about social interaction in here. How does that
Speaker 2: work when you only have two of them?
Speaker 1: Oh? If three? Okay?
Speaker 7: So if three and there is an intention that will
Speaker 7: bring new litter on. Because our goal was to get
Speaker 7: to six to eight sort of a typical pack size. Obviously,
Speaker 7: you know we ended up at three, so we'll look
Speaker 7: at adding another litter to that to that group.
Speaker 1: Hit me with it.
Speaker 3: We're gonna get in this earlier. Tell me the why.
Speaker 1: I mean I get the why, like I get the
Speaker 1: why from a showman like that. You would build a park, right,
Speaker 1: you'd be able to use them for movies, and that'd
Speaker 1: be valuable. You'd build a theme park and that would
Speaker 1: be valuable. But what is like the what is the why? Like?
Speaker 1: Or maybe that is the why? Why?
Speaker 7: Yeah, you could do those things. That is not our why.
Speaker 7: That is not what we're doing. Our why is really
Speaker 7: built more around around this selection process that we had
Speaker 7: about two years ago we were looking at, you know,
Speaker 7: knowing that our big three projects Willie mammoth, Tasmani, and
Speaker 7: tiger ditto, those are going to take us a while.
Speaker 7: He said, well, we should start working on other projects
Speaker 7: that we could also help develop some of these de
Speaker 7: extinction pipelines, get through this process a little quicker and
Speaker 7: be able to see and learn and help inform the
Speaker 7: other projects. In addition to that, in twenty sixteen, the
Speaker 7: ICN came out with a Proxy Species Rewilding Guide or
Speaker 7: a creation guide, basically this guideline document that an independent
Speaker 7: group of international experts wrote something like thirty five key
Speaker 7: points in this guideline that talks about if you were
Speaker 7: to pursue de extinction or the creation of a proxy
Speaker 7: of an extinct species which is easier just called the extinction,
Speaker 7: here is how you should do it. And one of
Speaker 7: the most important things that it talks about there is,
Speaker 7: you know, there's a big welfare implication which sort of
Speaker 7: goes back to why we selected the specific edits we selected.
Speaker 7: There's also this process that these things should happen sort
Speaker 7: of in this contained, almost laboratory environment where we if
Speaker 7: you're going to pursue this the first time you do it.
Speaker 7: You should find a species that you know a lot about.
Speaker 7: You should do these things in a very controlled setting
Speaker 7: so you can study all the impacts from cradle to grave.
Speaker 1: Oh, just to be clear, the IUCN did this independent.
Speaker 7: Of you guys in twenty sixteen, way before Colossal was
Speaker 7: the thing.
Speaker 1: This was long. Yeah, so they were operating on like
Speaker 1: an assumption that we'll get there, but we weren't there yet.
Speaker 7: And that was when the Wooly Mammittee things and stuff
Speaker 7: was really bubbling up, and so it started. Biotechnology was
Speaker 7: getting to a point where they said we should come
Speaker 7: up with some sort of advantage. Yeah, so it was
Speaker 7: really it was great forethought. We use that as as
Speaker 7: a bit of a guiding light in the way that
Speaker 7: we designed this project. Because so we know a lot
Speaker 7: about canids and canad genetics. Right, we know more about
Speaker 7: canids than almost any other species, mostly because we all
Speaker 7: have you know, a gray wolf in our house, right,
Speaker 7: I mean it is dog days, right, we all have dogs.
Speaker 7: We all love our dogs. We study a lot about them,
Speaker 7: and we know a lot about North American canids. So
Speaker 7: that gave us a really strong foundation in order to
Speaker 7: be able to predict what were the effects of edits,
Speaker 7: what genes were responsible for, what physical trait, things like that.
Speaker 7: At the same time, there was this sort of you know,
Speaker 7: opportunity for us to show the de extinction pipeline is
Speaker 7: a real thing. I think when we talk about bringing
Speaker 7: back Willie Mammos, people sort of giggle and they go,
Speaker 7: that's never going to happen. So there was sort of
Speaker 7: this proof of principle need that we said, well, we
Speaker 7: could show how this would work. And finally, there was
Speaker 7: also the pop culture bit you touched on Direwolf, right,
Speaker 7: this idea that we could bring science into the pop culture,
Speaker 7: blend those, bring more eyes and attention onto de extinction,
Speaker 7: onto extinction conservation things like that. So there was this
Speaker 7: perfect ven diagram that sort of overlapped with gray Wolf
Speaker 7: and dire Wolf, that we could do all of those
Speaker 7: things while creating technologies that were responsible or could help
Speaker 7: save other endangered canids like the American red wolf, which
Speaker 7: you know lost in our bit of a media circus
Speaker 7: that occurred after Direwolf was this idea that we were
Speaker 7: also working on American red wolves and there's some cool
Speaker 7: stuff that we should talk about there. But so the
Speaker 7: why was sort of that perfect opportunity to blend in
Speaker 7: pop culture with a proof of principle of de extinction
Speaker 7: and taking that first passive de extinction that this twenty
Speaker 7: sixteen guideline sort of showed us how to do it,
Speaker 7: and that really outlined you know, know a lot about
Speaker 7: the animal, put them in an area where you can
Speaker 7: study them closely, and these would not be animals that
Speaker 7: would be a generation ready for release. We knew dire
Speaker 7: wolves were not going back into the wild. We made
Speaker 7: these as part of that pursuit of de extinction.
Speaker 1: So you do it knowing they won't go into the wild.
Speaker 1: Because those are our questions that have is how much
Speaker 1: do you like? How much how worried or wildlife professionals
Speaker 1: This is a question they hadn't had to grapple with before.
Speaker 1: How worried are wildlife professionals and conservationists that you would
Speaker 1: create a that you would like, create a creature that
Speaker 1: could potentially get out and then reproduce what imperiled species
Speaker 1: in a way that might be negative for those imperiled species,
Speaker 1: Like that's got to be a real concern. We're having
Speaker 1: a conversation right now where guys are like in the
Speaker 1: deer in the servid world, people are saying, oh, we
Speaker 1: can make We have some examples of deer that are
Speaker 1: very slow to develop CWD or they get CWD, but
Speaker 1: they're slow to be affected by it, And they say,
Speaker 1: what we'd like to do is cut these deer loose,
Speaker 1: just to introduce some of this besides it being, as
Speaker 1: it's been explained to me by many servid experts, is
Speaker 1: kind of like doesn't make sense when you understand the
Speaker 1: scale of the millions of deer out there and that
Speaker 1: you're going to try to like influence gene flow by
Speaker 1: cutting animals loose. But they also point to all these
Speaker 1: moral issues and other like issues like what if those
Speaker 1: things also carry a susceptibility to other diseases? What if
Speaker 1: that infers upon them a so sort of hidden weakness. Right, So,
Speaker 1: if you have these creatures and they get out and
Speaker 1: they start breeding with wolves, I assume they could breed
Speaker 1: with wolves. How nervous are people that that'll happen?
Speaker 7: I mean, that's a question we get almost every day
Speaker 7: when when people talk about it. So, first, the first
Speaker 7: step to protect against that is the facility itself, you know,
Speaker 7: extremely secure double fence actually triple fence if you include
Speaker 7: our perimeter fence. You know, we just we've had to
Speaker 7: have really thorough conversations with government agencies to explain all
Speaker 7: the measures that have been taken to ensure it's a
Speaker 7: biosecure facility. So there's that piece of it. The other
Speaker 7: side of it is is really sort of like the
Speaker 7: CWD example is really good is you know, we need
Speaker 7: to know more about these animals before you would ever
Speaker 7: cut something loose, whether it's a dire wolfer, it's a
Speaker 7: wooly mammoth, right, we need to know a lot about
Speaker 7: these animals and what are the effects of gene editing,
Speaker 7: what are the effects of cloning, what are the effects
Speaker 7: of the specific edits we chose, which is exactly why
Speaker 7: we chose dire wolf because we knew it'd stay in
Speaker 7: this area and we can do that cradle to grave
Speaker 7: sort of research with them. So this is a great
Speaker 7: opportunity for just to show what are those impacts. But
Speaker 7: you know, the CWD example is really interesting because you
Speaker 7: are you know, we get a question about playing God
Speaker 7: a lot, and that is sort of one of those
Speaker 7: sort of God decisions we're making. As we said, these
Speaker 7: animals have this specific preon gene that makes them more
Speaker 7: resistant or you know more can can bear the preonic
Speaker 7: disease more than others. But what are the what are
Speaker 7: the things that tag along with that? Or if all
Speaker 7: that's say, all the white tail in Texas were suddenly
Speaker 7: wiped out by CWD and only the animals that were
Speaker 7: released are remain you've created this sort of genetic bottleneck
Speaker 7: because I guess you didn't make ten thousand of those, right,
Speaker 7: you only made a hundred of them. So there is that,
Speaker 7: you know, there are a lot of these ethical decisions
Speaker 7: we have to have. Love the extinction, I love class.
Speaker 7: I love the Diary Project because it push puts that
Speaker 7: debate forward because we're gonna have to start having these
Speaker 7: conversations more.
Speaker 1: Right, That's that's like in my mind, that is the Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that is the conversation. And and and I credit
Speaker 1: like to get somewhere, like, you know, let's let's say
Speaker 1: look at the people that are eager about the idea
Speaker 1: of colonizing Mars. Right, Yeah, there's all kinds of questions,
Speaker 1: huge questions about the possibility that but at some point
Speaker 1: you just go like, well we'll start going that direction.
Speaker 1: We'll solve what we can solve, understanding that there could
Speaker 1: possibly be a wall that we don't see. Like that
Speaker 1: you start before the pathway is clear, yep, right, you
Speaker 1: just like I don't know, we'll start walking that way
Speaker 1: and when.
Speaker 3: What happens, what happens, may we fall off the end
Speaker 3: of the earth.
Speaker 1: At some point it was all or not, but we
Speaker 1: got to start asking questions answer questions. I feel that
Speaker 1: with anything to do with the extinction, Like, because I
Speaker 1: don't understand the science, I'm not like train enough, smart
Speaker 1: enough to.
Speaker 3: Understand the science.
Speaker 1: You are a doctor, though I am.
Speaker 3: Other area of forestry.
Speaker 1: I can't understand the science, like I'm incapable of understanding science,
Speaker 1: but I can understand this. At some point, the de
Speaker 1: extinction process will be that we have, like we have
Speaker 1: a Tasmanian tiger, or a thiosine or an approximate we
Speaker 1: have an approximate ivory built woodpecker. We humbly ask your
Speaker 1: permission to let it go. And like I can just
Speaker 1: imagine the resistance, maybe even a knee jerk resistance, maybe
Speaker 1: an unwarranted resistance, but that will that to me not insurmountable,
Speaker 1: But that to me is the final argument.
Speaker 6: Because there's got to be a like, what's going to happen?
Speaker 6: And if we do, yes, we want to see what's
Speaker 6: going to happen?
Speaker 7: Right, But I think what's missed often in that sort
Speaker 7: of that very conservative approach to these things of well,
Speaker 7: we need to answer every question before we take the
Speaker 7: next step, is what is the opportunity cost of not
Speaker 7: acting right? If we could restore a diallyscene to Tasmania,
Speaker 7: could we start to reduce wildlife disease and level out
Speaker 7: prey populations in a way that helps support biodiversity of Tasmania? Yeah,
Speaker 7: I think we could. Are there some other negative effects
Speaker 7: there might be, and we should understand those. But we
Speaker 7: also can't say we need to tick one hundred percent
Speaker 7: of the boxes before we take the next step, because
Speaker 7: we will never get anywhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think you know, Teddy Roosevelt had that really famous
Speaker 7: quote in the moment of any decision, the best thing
Speaker 7: to do is the right thing, The next best thing
Speaker 7: to do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing
Speaker 7: to do is nothing right. And so that's really our
Speaker 7: mentality is we need to push forward. We need to
Speaker 7: push technologies forward that give us an opportunity to solve
Speaker 7: for some issues, and could there be this butterfly effect
Speaker 7: that creates an unforeseen issue. Absolutely, should we be prepared
Speaker 7: as possible before we take those steps. Absolutely, I'm not
Speaker 7: debating that. But right now there is there is an
Speaker 7: issue in the conservation community that we are accepting status
Speaker 7: quo because we're afraid of the unknown, and we haven't
Speaker 7: acknowledged that status quo means a reduction of biodiversity over
Speaker 7: the next twenty five years of maybe up to fifty
Speaker 7: percent of the biodiversity that exists today. We need to
Speaker 7: start taking steps and bringing tools to the to the
Speaker 7: conservation game that create fundamental change, that create magnitudes of change,
Speaker 7: because we are getting our asses kicked on the biodiversity front.
Speaker 6: So another why that I've heard is like, why work
Speaker 6: with a species like a dire wolf that ultimately proved
Speaker 6: to be like unsuccessful. You know, it had its time
Speaker 6: and then was unable to cope with whatever changes led
Speaker 6: to its extinction. Why not work with like Siberian tis
Speaker 6: that are like imperiled and you could grow those.
Speaker 3: If they won't let them caught them loose.
Speaker 7: I'm just saying I think it's also not an either
Speaker 7: or proposition, that's not how we work. We are a
Speaker 7: mores more yes and type of group. So we loved
Speaker 7: using de extinction as this ability to bring new eyeballs,
Speaker 7: new funding to the table, bring attention and awareness and
Speaker 7: money to the conservation battles that we face on the
Speaker 7: endangered spaces front by using the extinction as an engine
Speaker 7: to fuel that that fight. So with the with the
Speaker 7: de extinction of the dire wolf, we have also been
Speaker 7: working on the genetic rescue of the American red wolf.
Speaker 7: Right red wolf declared extinct in the wild in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 7: In the sixties and seventies, US Fish and Wildlife realized
Speaker 7: that we had almost killed them all. So they went
Speaker 7: to Louisiana and Texas and they captured what they thought
Speaker 7: was the remaining group of red wolves using very specific
Speaker 7: morphological measurements similar to this dire wolf gray wolf debate right, Well,
Speaker 7: in reality with they did is they caught fourteen animals
Speaker 7: and they said this is now the founding population of
Speaker 7: a captive group that will then be kept in human
Speaker 7: care until we figure out how to get them back
Speaker 7: into the wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah. On what was the island they put them on?
Speaker 7: Oh? Yeah, I can't even was it off South Carolina? Yeah,
Speaker 7: it was off South Carolina. Now now they're in northeastern
Speaker 7: North Carolina, which is the experimental release site. Well, the
Speaker 7: problem with that is they were looking for a very
Speaker 7: specific phenotype and they didn't have the power genetics in
Speaker 7: the seventies when they were trying to understand what was
Speaker 7: a red wolf and what was a coyote in Louisiana
Speaker 7: and Texas. So what they did is they caught fourteen
Speaker 7: animals that fit a very specific bill. Wind the clock
Speaker 7: back about eight nine years ago Bridget von Holt from
Speaker 7: Princeton University in Chris Enbreski for Michigan Tech, they rediscovered
Speaker 7: that there is actually this extremely high level of red
Speaker 7: wolf ancestry in that canid population in Louisiana and Texas.
Speaker 7: And if you look at the genetics of those canids
Speaker 7: from this sort of high spot and it radiates out,
Speaker 7: you can see that the proportion of red wolf within
Speaker 7: these these Louisiana and Texas populations is about seventy percent
Speaker 7: red wolf thirty percent coyote. As you radiate out, you
Speaker 7: sort of flip it and by the time you get
Speaker 7: to like Dallas where I live, it's totally inverse. It's
Speaker 7: barely any red wolf in totally coyote. So this is
Speaker 7: a very unique group of canids that have persisted since
Speaker 7: the seventies. Meanwhile, the closed population that used the captive
Speaker 7: population that used for reintroduction to North Carolina has had
Speaker 7: the same fourteen founders. Actually only twelve of those bred
Speaker 7: and are represented. So now you have about two hundred
Speaker 7: and fiftywo hundred and seventy animals in captive population that
Speaker 7: stemmed from twelve individuals, huge genetic bottleneck and totally missed,
Speaker 7: you know, some of the phenotypic diversity of the red wolf.
Speaker 7: Going back to aliens abducted you and I, they would
Speaker 7: have missed all the people you liveing in Asia and
Speaker 7: Africa and South America, and they, you know, they would
Speaker 7: think everybody looks like like us, and that would be
Speaker 7: a horrible representation of what our species actually is. They
Speaker 7: did similar to that, they missed a lot of genetic
Speaker 7: diversity that still exists there. So we've created using the
Speaker 7: same technology used to make dire wolves, we now have
Speaker 7: this ability to be able to sequence all of these
Speaker 7: red wolves or these Gulf Coast canids, is what we
Speaker 7: call them or ghost wolves, because they have such high
Speaker 7: levels of genetic ancestry of the American red wolf. They
Speaker 7: also have a portion of their genome that's not assigned
Speaker 7: to any other canid. So it's likely that ghost portion
Speaker 7: is the ancestral red wolf, the pre extinction red wolf
Speaker 7: that we don't have our reference to yet, but we're creating.
Speaker 7: We're doing historic sequencing to understand before the extinction what
Speaker 7: was red wolf, and then that would assign how much
Speaker 7: red wolf are these coyotes. Now that's an opportunity, and
Speaker 7: this is one of the things we've been meeting with
Speaker 7: the US government and Secretary of Bergamon is now we
Speaker 7: have this opportunity to create a genetic rescue tool that
Speaker 7: could be an you know, sort of an opportunity to
Speaker 7: the US Fish and Wilde Recovery program to say, your
Speaker 7: species is sort of headed for extinction because of its
Speaker 7: extreme genetic inbreeding. We have a fresh set of genetics
Speaker 7: that we could plug into your population and help sort
Speaker 7: of revitalize. Similar to when Texas cougars went into the
Speaker 7: Florida panther population. We could do that type of genetic rescue.
Speaker 1: Effort, which was controversial at the time.
Speaker 7: And now people hail it as one of the biggest successes.
Speaker 1: What it was like, well, you're corrupting the Florida gene
Speaker 1: pool or it's not the same thing. Yeah, those Florida
Speaker 1: panthers will now be not quite Florida panthers.
Speaker 7: But they won't be cross eyed and can Yeah, And.
Speaker 3: People are like, well they're closer than none.
Speaker 7: Yes, would be the art. That's our focus is function
Speaker 7: within an ecosystem. Can we create a direwolf that would
Speaker 7: have performed the same function in its ecosystem or can
Speaker 7: we help rescue a species and it still performed the
Speaker 7: same function. The answer is yes, we absolutely can, and
Speaker 7: we need to be more focused on the pragmatic idea
Speaker 7: of what function does the species provide to its ecosystem
Speaker 7: versus genetic purity in this weird eugenics mentality we have
Speaker 7: about species. So that's why we sort of I think,
Speaker 7: raise eyebrowsers because we are more focused on that side
Speaker 7: than this idea of what is one hundred percent gray wolf?
Speaker 7: What is one hundred percent tire?
Speaker 6: I think there's some of the blowback is like you
Speaker 6: have an animal and that animal is that animal out
Speaker 6: in the wild and it becomes like less wild when
Speaker 6: you start tinkering with its.
Speaker 5: Genes and laying the hand of man on it. And
Speaker 5: you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: But in that case, the hand of man, I mean
Speaker 1: they were in a pen. Off of that, they were
Speaker 1: in an enclosure on an island, right to build up
Speaker 1: a reproducible numb I understand. I'm just saying it's very different.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Well, and the hand of man is why they're
Speaker 7: going extinct, right we were, Yeah, we were poaching them
Speaker 7: out of existence.
Speaker 3: But let me hit you with a critical let me
Speaker 3: red wolf criticism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in some ways I think this criticism was
Speaker 1: a little bit unfair because it's not like you're taking
Speaker 1: federal money that would normally go to red wolf, recovering
Speaker 1: it and using it for something else exactly. So it's
Speaker 1: like it's pure what the work is added. Well, there's
Speaker 1: the criticisms that would say this, like, guys that work
Speaker 1: on the red wolf problem are like, our problem is
Speaker 1: that people shoot them, yep, and they get hit by cars. Yes,
Speaker 1: So we're not looking for new animals. We're looking for
Speaker 1: how do we create an atmosphere in a place where
Speaker 1: they don't get shot and hit by cars. So it
Speaker 1: was like it's like, that's beside the point it is.
Speaker 7: It is not a silver bullet to the red wolf problem.
Speaker 7: It provides a genetic rescue and get buys them more time.
Speaker 7: Their captive population will begin to suffer as it's a
Speaker 7: closed population, right, so this gives us an opportunity to
Speaker 7: inject fresh genetics. Also, that North Carolina site, you know, whatever,
Speaker 7: you take it back eight years ago or so, the
Speaker 7: US Fishing Wildlife announced, Hey, we're gonna start finding a
Speaker 7: second site. A parallel left it because obviously, you know,
Speaker 7: if you're familiar with the red wolf issue, red wolf
Speaker 7: population in that area got north of one hundred and
Speaker 7: fifty individuals in around twenty thirteen. Basically people started shooting
Speaker 7: and they started getting hit by cars. Today their primary
Speaker 7: issues car strikes. What's interesting is it's a different area.
Speaker 7: In Louisiana and Texas, you have larger landscapes, but you
Speaker 7: don't you don't have as many public lands that protect
Speaker 7: the animals there, and those animals have persisted since we
Speaker 7: thought they would have gone extinct. I think there is
Speaker 7: this weird issue that people sort of say, well, if
Speaker 7: we acknowledge that these animals are predominantly red wolf or
Speaker 7: maybe even truly red wolf as we understand more about
Speaker 7: their genetics. That's also acknowledging the fact that we didn't
Speaker 7: need to intervene in nineteen seventy. They would have continued
Speaker 7: to persist in that area.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because where they do or they did bring them,
Speaker 3: they've tried.
Speaker 1: To keep coyotes. Yeah, right, like that understanding of that
Speaker 1: species with coyotes, and then here you have that other
Speaker 1: source population that probably has a bleeding edge where Kyle's
Speaker 1: roll in.
Speaker 7: People talk about admixture. You know, people will say call
Speaker 7: it hybridization, and hybridization is the wrong word, but admixture
Speaker 7: sort of this idea that two species have this you know,
Speaker 7: blending of genetics. They look at that as a bad thing,
Speaker 7: as it as diluting the gene stock of a species.
Speaker 7: But you know, hybridization and admixture of species is a
Speaker 7: natural process. It's actually evolutionary process that confers evolutionary advantages
Speaker 7: to animals, gives them the opportunity to thrive with a
Speaker 7: new within an evolving habitat. Right, they can look at
Speaker 7: a species and say, oh, that coyote actually is you know,
Speaker 7: much faster or stronger, whatever it is, and they breed
Speaker 7: with that, and that that it brings that into their
Speaker 7: gene pool. That's an adaptive strategy.
Speaker 1: That's a criticism you hear of the Linnaean system of
Speaker 1: know that we.
Speaker 3: What's wolf, canis lupus.
Speaker 7: Yeah, canis lupis.
Speaker 1: We're Homo sapien. The rainbow trout is on crinth, on corinth,
Speaker 1: this micas micas whatever the hell you go in and
Speaker 1: you say, ki, I'm gonna take all creatures on Earth
Speaker 1: and I'm going to say that they're all. Whatever causes
Speaker 1: you to lose sight of the long time, and the
Speaker 1: long time.
Speaker 3: Is that there's fluidity.
Speaker 1: Yes, things right, It's similar to things come together and
Speaker 1: fall apart, and it's not static. It's a snapshot.
Speaker 7: When we talk about species recovery, it's the same problem.
Speaker 7: We say recovered to what right are we recovering? You know,
Speaker 7: in North American centric conservation we say recover to fourteen
Speaker 7: ninety two, right, recovered before Europeans came in and ruined
Speaker 7: the place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's always my view.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but you know there was a there ebbs and
Speaker 7: flows before that, and there would have been ebbs and
Speaker 7: flows after that. At what point, why do we pick
Speaker 7: an arbitrary point in time. Why do we pick an
Speaker 7: arbitrary definition of a species in time to say that's
Speaker 7: the species it's it's I think it makes sense from
Speaker 7: a communication standpoint, we need to be able to talk
Speaker 7: about these things, classify things, have goals. That's very important.
Speaker 7: But to use that as this ideology that we cannot
Speaker 7: stray from, I think is naive.
Speaker 1: When I had many conversations with friends of mine in
Speaker 1: the wildlife world, when when Colossal made its announcement about
Speaker 1: the dire wolves, one of the conversations I can't remember
Speaker 1: who the hell is talking to was saying to me,
Speaker 1: you know where this would be really helpful. Blackfooted ferrets. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: blackfooted ferriests went through a ten ferret bottleneck.
Speaker 7: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Okay, but I want to return. I want to do
Speaker 1: the regulatory thing about ivory built woodpeckers and blackfooted ferrets
Speaker 1: who like who? What would ever have to say? Okay
Speaker 1: to be that like our population? Our global population of
Speaker 1: blackfooted ferrets was reduced down to ten animals, But we
Speaker 1: have all these specimens that show a level of genetic
Speaker 1: diversity that did not exist in those ten Those blackfooted
Speaker 1: farans aren't getting shot they're not getting run over, right,
Speaker 1: they're fairly easy to protect. Who has to say yes
Speaker 1: to start inferring lost genetic diversity into blackfooted ferrets, Like
Speaker 1: who would be the who is the one that goes okay,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's hard.
Speaker 7: So blackfoot affair, it's a great example because they've been
Speaker 7: using biotechnology to try to genetically rescue blackfooted ferret because
Speaker 7: people were banking tissues of blackfoot affairs back into the seventies.
Speaker 7: So if you heard Elizabeth Ann, she was the clone
Speaker 7: that they brought back. She was, you know, an unrepresented founder.
Speaker 7: They cloned her. Unfortunately that that single individual she didn't
Speaker 7: actually she wasn't able to reproduce, but they cloned her again,
Speaker 7: and now they've had the first ever clone breed and
Speaker 7: give give birth to offspring. Who's the US Fish and
Speaker 7: Wildlife Service recovery program. So that's where we would start.
Speaker 7: You start with the US Fish and Wildlife Service because
Speaker 7: they are the ones that are mandated by the Endangered
Speaker 7: Species Act to recover species listed by the Act, so
Speaker 7: they have the jurisdiction in that area. Now, if we're
Speaker 7: just using cloning like what they did, US Fish and
Speaker 7: Wildlife has been able to do that on their own.
Speaker 7: Now if we were to bring colossal type technology, which
Speaker 7: is cloning plus genetic editing, and we said one of
Speaker 7: the primary drivers is the blackfooted ferret extinction crisis we're
Speaker 7: facing is sylvatic plague. Sylvatic plague is present in their
Speaker 7: obligatory prey species, the paradog. Thanks, that's a hard one
Speaker 7: to remember. So parad dogs are carrying sylvatic plague, and
Speaker 7: that when they predate on an animal that has plague,
Speaker 7: they also get plague and they die. We know for
Speaker 7: a fact that the closest living relative of the blackfooted ferret,
Speaker 7: which is the domestic ferret, has a naturally occurring resistance
Speaker 7: to plague. And it's a very small change. So you
Speaker 7: could go in and make a genetic edit within the
Speaker 7: black footed fair genome and suddenly ferrets are resistant to
Speaker 7: blackfooted to sylvatic plaque. And now we can make a
Speaker 7: huge difference in the recovery of blackfoot affairs.
Speaker 1: But now it's like, now we're going to have whatever.
Speaker 7: Yeah, now someone's now we're dealing with multiple agencies, the USDA,
Speaker 7: the FDA, they all have they all have some jurisdiction
Speaker 7: in what we call intentionally altered genomes.
Speaker 6: Okay, there are examples of US Fish and Wildlife Service
Speaker 6: like saying this is an acceptable level of genetic representation.
Speaker 6: Like in Colorado, they like with cutthroat trout, they would
Speaker 6: find like an isolated like subspecies of cutthroat trout and
Speaker 6: be like, it's like pretty much there, So we're going
Speaker 6: to put it back into this place. And so I
Speaker 6: mean someone's capable of saying like it's close enough.
Speaker 7: And that's US Fish and wildlife typically. But once we
Speaker 7: start getting into gene editing and sure start inviting more
Speaker 7: regulators to the table. And that's what we're doing right now,
Speaker 7: and we're actually pushing the boundaries of the regulatory environment
Speaker 7: because this you know, these were all hypotheticals and now
Speaker 7: their realities and people are scrambling to say, how the
Speaker 7: hell do we do this?
Speaker 1: So could you run? Could you How long does a
Speaker 1: blackfooted fair it live?
Speaker 7: Ten twelve years?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 3: Could you run?
Speaker 1: Would it makes sense that you would run a generation? Right,
Speaker 1: you'd make a plag resistant blackfooted ferret if you ran
Speaker 1: it for a if you just let it go for
Speaker 1: a generation in captivity, would you then be able to
Speaker 1: be like would you then be able to dispel Would
Speaker 1: that be enough time to dispel some of the questions? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think does it take like would you have to
Speaker 1: run five generations? It's a good question that puts you
Speaker 1: sixty years down the road.
Speaker 7: I mean, I certainly don't think Colossal has the answer
Speaker 7: for that, For that specific question. I think that is
Speaker 7: a regulatory question. You know, at what point do we
Speaker 7: feel comfortable with this now, knowing that they have a
Speaker 7: close living relative with this exact gene doing how how
Speaker 7: much do we need to do Because we've studied domestic
Speaker 7: ferrets for mm hmm hundreds of years, right, that might
Speaker 7: inform what's happening here. But I think you could set
Speaker 7: up an experimental population where you're able to do a
Speaker 7: lot of those things and within a generation or two
Speaker 7: begin to put animals back into the wild. Now, the
Speaker 7: trick with blackfooted ferret is that, you know, we probably
Speaker 7: need to find some resistance for prairie dogs as well.
Speaker 7: All right, if they're going to continue being the vector
Speaker 7: of the disease, you need to remove the vector, and
Speaker 7: they have to you know, you have to have parade
Speaker 7: dogs because parade dogs are blackfoot af fairts rely on
Speaker 7: their holes. Plus they eat them. So, you know, ranching
Speaker 7: folks don't really love parade dogs. They create a lot
Speaker 7: of problems for cattle, and so to go and convince
Speaker 7: people that we should do something protect parade dogs might
Speaker 7: be a harder sell.
Speaker 1: Like you feel that that the constant exposure could in time,
Speaker 1: that the susceptibility could could.
Speaker 7: Return potentially, I see.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: A month ago, Time magazine reported that the Mandan and
Speaker 2: Ricara tribes have expressed a desire to have dire wolves
Speaker 2: live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal
Speaker 2: is studying. So two things. One that seems to go
Speaker 2: against what you said earlier about the dire wolves living
Speaker 2: in the wild. And then two, what is that tribal
Speaker 2: communication been like with you guys about why they have
Speaker 2: a desire to have dire wolves on their reservation.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I wouldn't say it goes against what I was
Speaker 7: saying earlier. I think it would be replicating what we've
Speaker 7: done already, but on tribal lands.
Speaker 2: So in two thousand acre enclosure, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 7: So a year and a half ago we launched Colossal's
Speaker 7: Indigenous Council, which was bringing leaders in the conservation community
Speaker 7: from the indigenous world to the table to say, how
Speaker 7: can we enhance the conservation work you're already leading. How
Speaker 7: could we adopt you know, things like coexistence strategies that
Speaker 7: our Native American partners have been much better at than
Speaker 7: we have uh and and so part of that was,
Speaker 7: you know, one of the reasons for dire Wolf when
Speaker 7: we were launching is we were working with Chairman Fox
Speaker 7: at mh a nation in North Dakota, and we were
Speaker 7: talking to him about some bison genetic work that we
Speaker 7: were doing because Beth has a big background and by
Speaker 7: some genetics and and and Chairman Fox had started telling
Speaker 7: us an origin story of his of his people, and
Speaker 7: it talks about the great wolf, which was this large,
Speaker 7: extremely large wolf.
Speaker 4: UH.
Speaker 7: It was it was a white wolf or a light
Speaker 7: colored wolf, similar to what we're talking about, and it
Speaker 7: was part of their origin stories passed down through oral tradition,
Speaker 7: and their people believe that that that they had coexisted
Speaker 7: with dire wolves and that's part of their origin story.
Speaker 7: So there was a big interest. They said, if you
Speaker 7: guys are able to do this, we would love to
Speaker 7: bring the dire wolves back to our lands so we
Speaker 7: can also honor this UH this ancestral wolf that's important
Speaker 7: to our people.
Speaker 2: Who has done this is a global story? Who's done
Speaker 2: a good or a bad job? From your perspective of
Speaker 2: covering it?
Speaker 7: That's a that's a great question.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, there was one that was crazy.
Speaker 7: What's that one?
Speaker 1: It was like, I don't even want to say on
Speaker 1: the air.
Speaker 3: It was like a cult reporter.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, we won't give them any clicks. That was wild.
Speaker 7: That was that was just looney tune stuff. I think
Speaker 7: there's been some bad stuff. A good example is what
Speaker 7: is the Cowboy Statesman. There's a Wyoming publication. They wrote
Speaker 7: an article about, you know, this is what's going to
Speaker 7: happen when direwolves introduced to Yellowstone, Like there's such a
Speaker 7: leap of logic, steps to the end. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 7: it was just you know, this is going to be
Speaker 7: horrible for Yellowstone. You know.
Speaker 2: Well, I like their stuff generally, but they are kind
Speaker 2: of bulldogs. I could see how they could take a
Speaker 2: story like this and and do exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was skipping a lot of steps.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Another one that did a poor job that I was
Speaker 7: disappointed with because it's a friend of ours that we
Speaker 7: know pretty well. Was the Washington posted after Secretary Bergham
Speaker 7: had come out with the public statement of support for
Speaker 7: the extinction technologies as a tool for conservation. Was basically there.
Speaker 7: The headline was this really superficial stretch that said, oh,
Speaker 7: Secretary Bergham and the Trump administration will use the extinction
Speaker 7: to gut the Endanger Species Act. And they've said that. Well,
Speaker 7: they didn't say that. I mean his act, his quote,
Speaker 7: which is pretty powerful, and I was blown away that
Speaker 7: he took such a bold stance. Basically said, this is
Speaker 7: technology that could be fundamentally game changing to the recovery
Speaker 7: of species, which would lead to delisting. This wasn't just
Speaker 7: gutting the endangers.
Speaker 1: I read that, and that was but that's a very
Speaker 1: common kind of environmental reporting. Yeah, that it was. He
Speaker 1: he said something to the effect of in a perfect world,
Speaker 1: we would never get there.
Speaker 3: Yes, And then that was taken like, in.
Speaker 1: A proper role, we would never get to needing the
Speaker 1: ESA correct, which would wind up being if you if
Speaker 1: you pull a bunch of Americakinson said, would you like
Speaker 1: to live in a world where the Endangered Species Act
Speaker 1: was never necessary? Everyone will go Well, sure, he says that,
Speaker 1: and it's that he must mean he's going to get
Speaker 1: rid of it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's just funny and it happens.
Speaker 1: It was like it was it was a wild extrapolation,
Speaker 1: but I see what they were getting at. They're getting
Speaker 1: at that. It would be like, oh, they're going to
Speaker 1: use a squishy definition, right that, Like like, here's the fear.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing, like what what's driving the mentality? It would
Speaker 1: be that you get down to ten blackfooted ferrets and
Speaker 1: someone saying like, wow.
Speaker 3: They really should have ees a protection.
Speaker 7: And they'd be like, don't worry, we just ordered two hundred, right,
Speaker 7: But what's missing and like that's like I think that's
Speaker 7: what they're getting That would become the play in that
Speaker 7: sort of that just you know, menu of options and
Speaker 7: ordering the next species of interest. What's missing in that
Speaker 7: whole thing is habitat. And that's what I think a
Speaker 7: lot of these environmental reporters that have taken that very
Speaker 7: hardline stance are missing. Is this idea that recovery has
Speaker 7: very specific parameters around habitat requirement, right and sustainable population
Speaker 7: in the wild. So in order to achieve recovery, there's
Speaker 7: a habitat requirement. Also, I think de extinction technologies and
Speaker 7: using de extinction technologies to recover in danger species also
Speaker 7: has this really great sort of beacon of hope and
Speaker 7: sort of inspirational effort that if we said tomorrow we
Speaker 7: could bring back the I rebuild woodpecker, would we start
Speaker 7: suddenly protecting doing a better job of protecting habitat in Arkansas?
Speaker 5: Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 6: If the ESA comes with what many people would call
Speaker 6: like onerous regulations right regarding protecting habitat, other people would
Speaker 6: be like, oh.
Speaker 7: No, it's like we need them anymore.
Speaker 6: So bringing them back doesn't necessarily solve the problem exactly.
Speaker 7: It is a tool that could help accelerate and scale recovery.
Speaker 7: That's what it is.
Speaker 1: I want. I want a narrow one on the ivy
Speaker 1: build woodpecker. Maybe you can correct me on some of this,
Speaker 1: but here's why it excites me. It's like.
Speaker 3: There still is habitat.
Speaker 7: There is people more today than when they went extinct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, I mean, there was a lot of habitat
Speaker 1: destruction that led to the problem, but there is habitat. Uh,
Speaker 1: this was so recent, right, there's people alive right now,
Speaker 1: there are people alive that saw Ivory build woodpeckers.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's actually like photographs of them. There's a real
Speaker 7: to real video of what they think was the last
Speaker 7: Ivory build woodpecker leaving as singer was cutting down the tree.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: It's pretty powerful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's like, yeah, that's the craziest part about it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Dan Flores talks about that while New World is They're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some in that tree. Literally, I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: joking literally that they actually cut the tree during a
Speaker 1: logging project. There was a contentious logging project cut the tree.
Speaker 1: No one really knew that it was the last ones,
Speaker 1: but they knew it was damn near and it turned
Speaker 1: out probably to be the last ones. They cut the
Speaker 1: tree down with the thing in there as like a
Speaker 1: hey man, don't tell me what to do kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So here you have where there's habitat. It's it like
Speaker 1: it's hard to put it a try, Like it might
Speaker 1: as well have not gone extinct, do you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? Like it's like it one extinct. It seems
Speaker 1: to almost have gone extinct by like a freak chance,
Speaker 1: or it might as well if it didn't, if it had,
Speaker 1: if it had stayed intact, we wouldn't think it was weird. Yeah,
Speaker 1: follow me, yep. If we had, if we had kept
Speaker 1: short faced bears and tact, it would be a thing
Speaker 1: that people remarked on every time they killed a person.
Speaker 3: You know, I'd be like, my god, can you believe?
Speaker 1: Right? The same way we marvel over alligators, we marvel
Speaker 1: over grizzly bears, we marvel over polar bears, and just
Speaker 1: be a bird.
Speaker 3: Yep, it'd be like a bird.
Speaker 1: It was kind of cool, but like a bird, you know,
Speaker 1: so like it's not an earth shattering environmental thing to
Speaker 1: have it around the ranch and farm community is not
Speaker 1: gonna have a be jeopardized by this.
Speaker 4: Ye.
Speaker 1: I can't think of anyone except affiliated woodpecker that would
Speaker 1: maybe be annoyed.
Speaker 3: They would like they're like, dude, we were the biggest woodpecker.
Speaker 3: Now we're not.
Speaker 1: Like they might be annoyed, but it's just there's no
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like there's friction.
Speaker 7: No, there's not there.
Speaker 1: If we people you go like, how do you feel
Speaker 1: about bringing the irobialt woodpecker back, most people would be
Speaker 1: like the what Yeah, like it's the woodpecker is here,
Speaker 1: not long ago, We're gonna put it back.
Speaker 3: It's just it's a woodpecker. They'd probably be like, Okay,
Speaker 3: you know what I.
Speaker 1: Mean, Like like that seems to me, just from from
Speaker 1: a novice perspective, that seems to me like the thing.
Speaker 7: To do first, Well first is hard, right, there's technical
Speaker 7: challenges and the extinction of a bird. Right, So we
Speaker 7: have the Dodo project, which is our flagship avian species,
Speaker 7: and this is sort of leading the charge and overcoming
Speaker 7: the technical challenges, the biggest challenges. There is an important
Speaker 7: step in a d extinction where you've edited a cell
Speaker 7: line to the point where you go, this is now
Speaker 7: a cell of the animal of interest. This is now
Speaker 7: a direable cell. Now we'll use somatic cell nuclear transfer,
Speaker 7: which is most famously Dolly the Sheep cloning. That's called
Speaker 7: somatic cell nuclear transfer, and that's taking the DNA from
Speaker 7: that cell, removing the DNA of an egg cell and
Speaker 7: putting your DNA in and that fertilizes the cell and
Speaker 7: it becomes an embryo, and then you can transfer it
Speaker 7: into a circuit. With birds, very early on in the
Speaker 7: development of their egg they're calcifying the outside of it. Right,
Speaker 7: we can't access the eggs internally of the of a bird.
Speaker 7: We have to wait for them to lay those. So
Speaker 7: we are creating new platforms in order to edit germ cells,
Speaker 7: or the cells that eventually become sperm and egg. So
Speaker 7: as an egg is laid, you can window the egg,
Speaker 7: you can extract a few microleaders of blood. You can
Speaker 7: plate that blood and take out what we call them
Speaker 7: primordial germ cells. Those primordial germ cells are the cells
Speaker 7: that are circulating freely in the blood of this early fetus,
Speaker 7: and they eventually migrate to the gonads and they become
Speaker 7: sperm or egg, depending on the gender of that egg.
Speaker 7: If we then edit those while they're plated, you can
Speaker 7: create a stable line of these in vitro. Then now
Speaker 7: you have edited the germ cell that will eventually become
Speaker 7: Spermer egg, and then in a different egg, which is
Speaker 7: you know, sort of an egg that's been engineered to
Speaker 7: be sterile so they don't produce any of their own
Speaker 7: Spermer egg. At that same point of development, you can
Speaker 7: check you'll edited germ cells, they migrate to the gonads,
Speaker 7: and then you could have a pigeon or a chicken
Speaker 7: that's creating the sperm or egg of a dodo. When
Speaker 7: they breed, they give birth, they lay a Dodo egg
Speaker 7: or in this case, an I Rebuild woodpecker egg. So
Speaker 7: we're overcoming those challenges. Right now, we don't know a
Speaker 7: lot about woodpeckers, so we need to study more. Last
Speaker 7: year we launched Colossal's nonprofit, the Colossal Foundation. I'm the
Speaker 7: executive director of that foundation, which is meant to sort
Speaker 7: of be where the rubber of de extinction meets the
Speaker 7: road where.
Speaker 1: It meaning the road being the regulatory structure.
Speaker 7: Regulatory structure and critically endangered species. How do we literally
Speaker 7: keep species off our duty lists?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 7: But also in some cases there's a North American conservation
Speaker 7: focus of that. So one of the flagship projects for
Speaker 7: the foundation is the I Rebuild Woodpecker.
Speaker 1: What is is it? Mauritius mauritious?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What is their attitude toward the Dodo?
Speaker 7: It's interesting it is a culturally significant icon of Mauritius.
Speaker 7: It is also closely associated with colonization. Right as colonizers
Speaker 7: showed up, they brought this species that wiped out this
Speaker 7: the Dodo. Now what's interesting there was not.
Speaker 1: Wasn't it people that wiped out the dodo.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it was the colonizers that came in, right. But
Speaker 7: what's interesting is Mauritius didn't have an indigenous people at
Speaker 7: that time, right, so they sort of came into the island.
Speaker 7: They introduced invasive species. So it was primarily rats and
Speaker 7: cats that were introduced to the island that started decimating
Speaker 7: a ground nesting bird and a flightless bird at that
Speaker 7: that's what led to the dodo.
Speaker 3: Plus sometimes I thought they just ate them all.
Speaker 7: There's there is a common misconception that they were a
Speaker 7: favorite food of sailors. There are also some really interesting
Speaker 7: funny logs you can read of, you know, sailors that
Speaker 7: said they would bring them on to provision the boat
Speaker 7: and then people would just resent having to eat it
Speaker 7: because it was all they had was this gross, greasy bird.
Speaker 7: So it was probably some combination thereof but the real
Speaker 7: issue was habitat was being destroyed as people came in
Speaker 7: to make room for colonies, and invasive species were just
Speaker 7: wiping out nests. And the dodo hadn't evolved with a
Speaker 7: mam million predator, so it didn't have this natural instinct
Speaker 7: to run or to do any so, you know, I
Speaker 7: think they said from the time Dodo was discovered to
Speaker 7: it when extinct was eighty years so just a really
Speaker 7: rapid extinction event. So Mauritius is really interested in recovering
Speaker 7: the Dodo. They on Mauritius, So we engage directly with
Speaker 7: the government of Mauritius with the Mursian Wildlife Foundation to
Speaker 7: talk about how can we use the extinction to drive
Speaker 7: conservation projects and habitat restoration projects on the island of
Speaker 7: Mauritius and the islets that surround Marcius. And then also
Speaker 7: in preparation for a Dodo, can we start to find
Speaker 7: habitat suitable habitat that would include us removing invasive species,
Speaker 7: not just invasive animals, but invasive plants have taken over.
Speaker 7: How can we restore the you know, the lost ebony trees,
Speaker 7: How can we start to bring back, you know, the
Speaker 7: forest of sixteen hundreds in order to prepare it for
Speaker 7: the Dodo. And so there's there's this amazing the interest,
Speaker 7: we have, this great underswellow support. We've launched a council
Speaker 7: of people, a stakeholders group that is about ten fifteen
Speaker 7: people that sort of represent a variety of industry from
Speaker 7: tourism to science to government, and regulatory so that we
Speaker 7: can begin to say, hey, we're making progress towards restoring
Speaker 7: the dota from extinction. What do we need to be
Speaker 7: doing here with the people of Mauritius, with the land
Speaker 7: of Mauritius, in order to make sure society, society is
Speaker 7: prepared and ecosystems are prepared.
Speaker 1: So crystal ball it for me? What ook at never
Speaker 1: not the science, the social component. If you had a
Speaker 1: crystal ball the social component, what are the odds socially,
Speaker 1: socially regulatory, whatever that you would get that you could
Speaker 1: get to where they would say, let's do it. Let's
Speaker 1: take this little islet and let's yeah cuss somehow, and
Speaker 1: they're just gonna They're gonna just live or die. They
Speaker 1: their ability to make a living here.
Speaker 7: I would never say anything's one hundred percent, because we
Speaker 7: could get wiped out by a night an asteroid. But
Speaker 7: right there there's I mean, I'm ruled out that. I
Speaker 7: like that the Earth kind of keeps going along. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I think it's ninety nine percent. Beth and I went
Speaker 7: to Murcius last year and had an incredible visit. We're
Speaker 7: going again this year, and the idea is to kind
Speaker 7: of keep these conversations. Moving forward, Mauritius has done an
Speaker 7: incredible job on their own of going and recovering some
Speaker 7: of the islets around there. There's this really famous island
Speaker 7: or islet on the north end of Mauritius called Round Island.
Speaker 7: It's this massive, round rock island. You know, you can't
Speaker 7: even you know, we landed a helicopter on it in
Speaker 7: order to get out there, and you're sort of at
Speaker 7: this twenty degree angle as you land, and you're landing
Speaker 7: on top of giant tortoises, and it was basically an
Speaker 7: island that was stripped down to just the rock. All
Speaker 7: the soil and plant life had been completely eradicated because
Speaker 7: they had introduced goats, and the goats were left there
Speaker 7: so that when you sailed buy you could pick up
Speaker 7: a few, you know, and you could provision the boat. Well,
Speaker 7: they just grazed the hell out of the whole thing,
Speaker 7: and basically every species native to that little islet was
Speaker 7: basically wiped out. So they've been recovering it for twenty years.
Speaker 7: And when you go and see where they were to
Speaker 7: where they are today, it's incredible work.
Speaker 1: So for all the reasons they've been recovering it Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they just wanted to bring background island. It has
Speaker 7: a lot of endemic species that we're important to try
Speaker 7: to save. So they're already doing this great work, I
Speaker 7: think colossal showing up with an opportunity to accelerate, enhance,
Speaker 7: bring more funding, try to bring technology to the table
Speaker 7: to do just that. So there are the reason why
Speaker 7: I think it's so high and imercious. The chances are
Speaker 7: so high and maercious. It's because there's all these islets
Speaker 7: that are sort of like living laboratories. You know, you
Speaker 7: can mitigate risk of some of these fears around GMOs
Speaker 7: or what is going to be the effect of this
Speaker 7: reintroduction by putting them on an island.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like if suddenly tomorrow all the grizzly bears in
Speaker 6: the lower forty eight when extinct us and you guys
Speaker 6: were like, oh that's okay, we can repopulate. There's still
Speaker 6: only so there's not a lot of appropriate habitat available
Speaker 6: for them, right, So.
Speaker 5: In an island.
Speaker 6: Situation, you have way more control. But it seems like
Speaker 6: your challenge is not like growing the animal, it's like
Speaker 6: cultivating a place where that animal can live successfully.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think there's a lot of challenges around preparing
Speaker 7: the habitat for one of these animals and making sure
Speaker 7: the protections are in place, but also making sure that
Speaker 7: the people are ready for that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think this is a huge step for a society
Speaker 7: to say we want to take this next step. Whoever
Speaker 7: is will be the first government regulator culture to say
Speaker 7: we want to introduce a species return from extinction to
Speaker 7: the wild. I mean that is a massive step. I
Speaker 7: mean that is going to take somebody very bold, and
Speaker 7: I think that's why island nations are a little more.
Speaker 7: They have a little more opportunity because they can mitigate
Speaker 7: the risk because they don't have to worry about their
Speaker 7: neighbors say you no time out, you're doing what?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: If we did this in the US, Canada would say
Speaker 7: what the hell are you doing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we know it's a little bit interesting. A similar
Speaker 1: approach was we wound up introducing wild turkeys in a
Speaker 1: lot of places that wild turkeys weren't from. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you know they think that historically he had turkeys and
Speaker 1: what's today thirty four states. Now we have turkeys in
Speaker 1: forty nine states. Very little friction there was I remember
Speaker 1: one state there was some friction in there and it
Speaker 1: was a worried about some rare annual and these guys
Speaker 1: wound up doing a big crop survey like bird crops,
Speaker 1: you know, and they just didn't find anything analogous to
Speaker 1: this and wild turkeys around the world or around the country,
Speaker 1: Like it just doesn't seem to think turkeys would pray on.
Speaker 3: But that was like one little.
Speaker 1: Test and they let them go, and it wound up
Speaker 1: being that we always talk about, well you have like invasives,
Speaker 1: which are bad, but it wound up being like it's
Speaker 1: like a species of no known negative. It's like no
Speaker 1: no negative. But the climates changed so much you might
Speaker 1: not get away with that what they were doing with
Speaker 1: turkeys into seventies, eighties, early nineties. You might not today
Speaker 1: be able to go into I'm not trying to pick
Speaker 1: on California today, it might not be able to go
Speaker 1: into California and say, hey, we're going to turn some
Speaker 1: wild turkeys loose.
Speaker 7: Oh like the cultural climate change.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what I mean, Like you might hit
Speaker 1: resistance for something that was just that happened. Because if
Speaker 1: you look at like the shift too in the fifties,
Speaker 1: they brought add ad into Texas, they brought Ibex into
Speaker 1: New Mexico.
Speaker 3: They bought oricx in New Mexico, and there.
Speaker 1: Was kind of a let's just see what happened, like
Speaker 1: they can't be bad attitude. That's that's built up resistance.
Speaker 1: And now even when people look like with ELK, we've
Speaker 1: only recovered ELK on fourteen percent of twenty percent of
Speaker 1: historic range. Fourteen percent of historic range, there's kind of
Speaker 1: mind boggling. Yeah, and that recovery effort is ground to
Speaker 1: a halt over chronic wasting disease. Just there's a less
Speaker 1: of an appetite to move servids from one area to
Speaker 1: another because like disease transmission. So it is in the
Speaker 1: conversation about what we get to a place where we're
Speaker 1: actually trying to do this, it's like the appetite seems
Speaker 1: to be just generally declining to like any kind of
Speaker 1: dice rolling.
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, I think you know there is a certain
Speaker 7: aspect of this that is you know better than you
Speaker 7: do better. Right, So we know that these animals, you know,
Speaker 7: a foreign animal or an invasive animal would have certain
Speaker 7: impacts on an ecosystem. So that is important that we
Speaker 7: take that precautionary approach because now we know better, so
Speaker 7: we must do better. However, I think the pendulum swunk
Speaker 7: all the way where now it's you know, any change
Speaker 7: is bad. Oh, and right now, if we do anything,
Speaker 7: if we try to change anything about the status quo,
Speaker 7: there are things we cannot account for. Yet therefore we
Speaker 7: should not take that step. And so we've moved into
Speaker 7: this fear based decision making, which is grinding recovery to
Speaker 7: a halt of a lot of species.
Speaker 1: No, and look, I was management help, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 7: So I think we need to sort of the pendulum
Speaker 7: needs to come back to the center. I think, you know,
Speaker 7: on most things in life, from this moderate approach is
Speaker 7: probably the best approach. So how can we make the
Speaker 7: most informed decision while also having a certain appetite for risk,
Speaker 7: and with this idea that without risk there is no
Speaker 7: chance for a win out there, right, we need to
Speaker 7: take certain risks in order to recover species.
Speaker 2: You mentioned earlier that you didn't care for the reporting
Speaker 2: by Washington Posts and Cowboys Stay Daily, who did a
Speaker 2: good job of covering the story.
Speaker 7: Well, we had a lot of great folks, I mean,
Speaker 7: you know, obviously we were blown away that we got
Speaker 7: the cover Time magazine and Time did a great job.
Speaker 7: Jeff Jeff Pluger. He did this great article on the
Speaker 7: whole thing. The New Yorker broke our embargo and published
Speaker 7: the story. Oh yeah, so, although we're mad at them,
Speaker 7: if you read the story, it's pretty good. It's pretty
Speaker 7: good story.
Speaker 2: They know they were breaking it.
Speaker 7: Yeah they did. There's you know, there's I'll just put
Speaker 7: it this way, there's some emails going back and forth
Speaker 7: saying can we do this? We said no, and then
Speaker 7: they did it. Anyways, So that was heartbreaking because there's
Speaker 7: so many, you know, there's one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 7: people at Colossal that we're working their tails off to
Speaker 7: do this thing. Our marketing team was killing themselves, their
Speaker 7: PR teams were killing themselves to have this really ambitious
Speaker 7: launch event and then for somebody to selfishly try to
Speaker 7: go first was really frustrating. But despite all of that,
Speaker 7: New Yorker read a pretty cool piece now that said,
Speaker 7: he gave me like the dumbest quote ever and that thing,
Speaker 7: so I'm a little up about it.
Speaker 1: He gave you a bad quote.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, you know, I was. I was out of
Speaker 7: the country when he was visiting, so I was zooming
Speaker 7: into a few calls and he was interviewing me over
Speaker 7: zoom and I just didn't have a lot of time.
Speaker 7: He basically said, what do you do here? You know,
Speaker 7: chief Animal Officers not a title. People really know what
Speaker 7: the hell it means. I'm not sure I know what
Speaker 7: it means. It's like you're a zoo keeper or something,
Speaker 7: chief zookeeper. One of my guys on my team calls
Speaker 7: me the chief pet officer. So I just told him
Speaker 7: I play with animals, just joking.
Speaker 1: Of course.
Speaker 7: That's the one thing he published.
Speaker 1: Like a cocky.
Speaker 7: I was like, there's a lot of thought that goes
Speaker 7: into what I do, right, But but it was fine.
Speaker 7: But yeah, I think there was a vast majority. I's
Speaker 7: a ninety five percent of the things that were published
Speaker 7: I thought were fair balanced, shed a positive light on
Speaker 7: what we were doing. Five percent of them were hyper
Speaker 7: negative to ass like almost just for the purpose of clickbait.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean you have to acknowledge that there's
Speaker 1: a real stir of the pot. Yeah yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you're starting the pot.
Speaker 7: That's what I like about it. I think the conservation
Speaker 7: pot needs to be stirred. Like I said, I think
Speaker 7: we've gone to this fear based approach, where you know,
Speaker 7: in the Teddy Roosevelt quote, we're at we're at the
Speaker 7: third point where we said, you know, the worst, We're
Speaker 7: doing the worst thing, which is we're not making decisions.
Speaker 6: But do you guys feel an urgency to you're not
Speaker 6: going to stop messing around with ancient extinct species, but
Speaker 6: do you feel an urgency to like do something like
Speaker 6: more timely, like with a specie that is like.
Speaker 7: We I mean, the American red wolf is a good
Speaker 7: example of how what exactly what we're doing. But the Foundation,
Speaker 7: the Colossal Foundation, has forty five conservation partners. That's forty
Speaker 7: five separate projects that we're running for endangered species conservation.
Speaker 7: Everything from how can we use artificial intelligence to unlock
Speaker 7: the language of wolves? Right here in Yellowstone working with
Speaker 7: the Yellowstone Wolf Project Yellowstone Forever, Jeff Reed and the
Speaker 7: Grizzly Systems team trying to unlock language and in a
Speaker 7: way that we can track wolves over space and time
Speaker 7: without requiring collars and understand what are they talking about.
Speaker 7: To conferring resistance to toxins from invasive species. The Northern coal
Speaker 7: from the Northern Territory of Australia, is being decimated because
Speaker 7: one of the animals that predates on is the invasive
Speaker 7: cane toad, which has a buffotox in the boo. That
Speaker 7: neurotoxin kills the cane the coal when they eat them.
Speaker 7: So we've actually found one base pair change that animals
Speaker 7: that co evolved with the cane toad in South America
Speaker 7: have evolved that. So we're changing that one base pairent
Speaker 7: coal and we've already shown in the lab that it
Speaker 7: confers resistance to bufotoxin. So now we can give that
Speaker 7: to the government off Australia and say here is a
Speaker 7: tool for you guys to recover your northern coal and
Speaker 7: as a bonus, they'll eat all those cane toads that
Speaker 7: are invasive and are sort of one of the most
Speaker 7: famous examples of an invasive species. We also created a
Speaker 7: vaccine to help elephants with one of the most deadly
Speaker 7: virus as they face the elephant indo, thelotropic Herpes virushi,
Speaker 7: kills about thirty percent of elephants and human care and
Speaker 7: more and more, we understand that is an is decimating
Speaker 7: wild populations. So you know, we have forty five of
Speaker 7: these projects ongoing. Obviously, What makes it to the top
Speaker 7: of that of the storyline is always the exction. But
Speaker 7: that's the power of the extinction is it does bring awareness,
Speaker 7: It brings attention, it brings funding. Four hundred and fifty
Speaker 7: million dollars we've raised over four years to support the
Speaker 7: business of Colossal, and we've raised another seventy five million
Speaker 7: dollars for the Colossal Foundation. So you know, we talk
Speaker 7: about conservation is an under resourced fight. We're bringing resources
Speaker 7: to table. These are not a distraction of resources from
Speaker 7: places where you know you would have normally given money
Speaker 7: to WWF. Now we're going to Silicon Valley, We're going
Speaker 7: to capital you know, venture capital investors, and.
Speaker 1: We're right vay getting They like, what in the end,
Speaker 1: because you're not a nonprofit, you're not an.
Speaker 3: Environmental we have a non profit, you have oh not
Speaker 3: a foundation?
Speaker 1: Yep, Well, then there's a for profit component one in
Speaker 1: the end, what is the product?
Speaker 7: The product is the all of the technology we're creating.
Speaker 7: So it's more about process. Les's it's about product. We're
Speaker 7: creating processes that then we can license that IP to
Speaker 7: other fields of science, human healthcare research, you know, university research,
Speaker 7: things like that. We've already spun out two companies out
Speaker 7: of Colossal that are now standalone businesses, self sufficient businesses.
Speaker 7: One is a computational biology platform, So it's an AI
Speaker 7: tool that essentially helps you compare genes of animals and
Speaker 7: understand this gene codes for this trade god that type
Speaker 7: of thing.
Speaker 1: Now clients being universities and research facilities. Exactly, I gotcha.
Speaker 7: Another one is a plastics degradation company. So we've identified
Speaker 7: a microbe that's able to consume almost every plastic we've
Speaker 7: ever thrown at it, everything from really soft plastics to
Speaker 7: very hard, high density plastics, and we're using genetic engineering
Speaker 7: to try to enhance those types of qualities. And so
Speaker 7: this gives us, you know, a new tool in the
Speaker 7: way to recycle plastics. And it doesn't just recycle limit
Speaker 7: to you know, smaller pieces of plastic microplastic. This is
Speaker 7: breaking down the molecular bonds of this. So that's sort
Speaker 7: of what we're doing, is we're this incubator of technology
Speaker 7: that we can spin out and it funds the whole program.
Speaker 2: I've seen how wrapped or recovery centers when they're feeding,
Speaker 2: like an eagle chick or a hawk chick, they'll cover
Speaker 2: themselves in a bed sheet and they'll put like a
Speaker 2: puppet on their end to feed the chicks. To prevent
Speaker 2: human imprinting, And what kind of protocols that you guys
Speaker 2: have about dealing with your three dire wolves, Like how
Speaker 2: many humans have they seen?
Speaker 7: Oh, they've probably seen say fifteen or twenty, but they
Speaker 7: see four or five on a regular basis. These are
Speaker 7: not candidates for release into the wild. So we take
Speaker 7: a slightly different approach. Right if we're creating a stable
Speaker 7: population of captive animals that could eventually go back into
Speaker 7: the wild, which is not the case with the dire wolves,
Speaker 7: but with the red wolves that we cloned, you know,
Speaker 7: this generation is not a candidate for rewilding. We'll begin
Speaker 7: to take a more hands off approach as you create
Speaker 7: subsequent generations and model after very similar projects that are
Speaker 7: already going on with red wolf release into North Carolina,
Speaker 7: Mexican gray Wolf into the American Southwest. So mammals are
Speaker 7: a little different. They don't imprint the way birds do.
Speaker 7: Birds have a very strong imprint potential, so you can
Speaker 7: really mess a chick up if it imprints on a human,
Speaker 7: whereas with the mammals, they don't take that same level
Speaker 7: of their habituation.
Speaker 6: There's a certain degree of like learn behavior too, right,
Speaker 6: Like wolves need to be taught how to hunt by
Speaker 6: their pack, and.
Speaker 7: So there's a lot of opportunity for cross fostering. So
Speaker 7: you know, you can create puppies that then you would
Speaker 7: drop into dens of wild wolves if you wanted to,
Speaker 7: like say this was a gray wolf project. As you know,
Speaker 7: the pack it leaves the den for a bit, you
Speaker 7: can go and drop puppies in, and that's called cross fostering.
Speaker 7: So we could do that.
Speaker 1: Drop bunch nerd because someone we're going to get at.
Speaker 5: But as far as like you never.
Speaker 6: You would never be able to get to a situation
Speaker 6: where you would have real dial like diar Rols teaching
Speaker 6: diar Rolls how.
Speaker 1: To be direbls. You know that's impossible.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible generations
Speaker 7: to get to, but you first have to.
Speaker 3: Know what there's no way to find out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean this kind of goes back to some
Speaker 7: of the debate that you know, I thought people were
Speaker 7: going to say, you made a dire wolf, What the hell?
Speaker 7: This thing's an enormous hyper carnivore and really what they
Speaker 7: were going, well, that's not a direolf. You're so sure
Speaker 7: that's not a diarolf? Can you please tell me what
Speaker 7: a dire wolf is? Because if you can't tell me
Speaker 7: definitively what it is, you can't tell me what it
Speaker 7: isn't uh, you know, there's there's a lot of nuance
Speaker 7: to taxonomy, and we don't know how transgenics fall into
Speaker 7: taxonomy that you know, taxonomy wasn't built with this idea
Speaker 7: that suddenly along the evolutionary tree something just pops up
Speaker 7: on its own branch, right, So transgenics really challenge taxonomic classification.
Speaker 7: So you know, we're trying to help the world cope
Speaker 7: with that. We're trying to challenge taxonomists to figure out
Speaker 7: because transgenics are not going to stop a dire wolf.
Speaker 7: It won't stop with colossal they're synthetic. Biology is now
Speaker 7: a tool that conservation can use to cover a number
Speaker 7: of animals, a number of species issues. There will be
Speaker 7: the use of one gene from one animal put into
Speaker 7: another animal, and then they go, well, how do you
Speaker 7: now classify that animal? You know, taxonomy wasn't built to
Speaker 7: handle that.
Speaker 1: But and the thing and the behavior thing though this
Speaker 1: isn't the hack on it.
Speaker 3: But I'm saying, like you just.
Speaker 1: You might get you might get where you can win
Speaker 1: the debate and say, like, based on an agreed upon definition.
Speaker 7: This is a dire wolf.
Speaker 1: But what the problem is when you if you say like, behaviorally,
Speaker 1: there's no foundation for it.
Speaker 7: We can't say definitively no, you would never know what
Speaker 7: the animal what was doing. We haven't studied it. I mean,
Speaker 7: there's how many species across the world that are live
Speaker 7: today that we don't know behaviorally what they do, what
Speaker 7: is their function with an ecosystem?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: So it's it's a valid point. It's one that it
Speaker 7: will challenge the extinction as we go forward. But I
Speaker 7: don't think it's a reason to not pursue the.
Speaker 2: Exc Has there been anything with their behavior that really
Speaker 2: surprises the people who watch them, Like they never howl
Speaker 2: or boy, they sure like digging holes.
Speaker 7: They love sticks, O big fans of sticks.
Speaker 2: Like wolf puppies love sticks.
Speaker 7: I don't know, yeah, I mean I don't think they
Speaker 7: get a lot of sticks to say, and tire.
Speaker 1: You guys carrying bones around it?
Speaker 6: Do you guys like go in there and cuddle with them,
Speaker 6: or will they rip your arm off.
Speaker 7: There's no cuddling at this point. You know, we were
Speaker 7: pretty specific early on. Contact was only what was required
Speaker 7: for the care and health of the animal. Now contact
Speaker 7: is basically not required. We'll drive in in order to
Speaker 7: drop feed and things like that. They also have an
Speaker 7: indoor building that they have access to, and it's sort
Speaker 7: of a smaller pen where they we can coax them
Speaker 7: into that so that we can do some basic management
Speaker 7: stuff if we ever had to, you know, anesthetize an
Speaker 7: animal because it was sick or injured. We use these areas,
Speaker 7: so there is some habituation to those areas because it's
Speaker 7: a management advantage for us to be able to not
Speaker 7: have to go out there and dart one.
Speaker 2: So what about their behavior is surprised you though?
Speaker 7: I know it is so early. It's hard to say, right,
Speaker 7: because they were just really goofy puppies that were that
Speaker 7: were around people and now they're really developing into their
Speaker 7: own I think the level of despite the habituation early
Speaker 7: on in their life, the level of flight distance that
Speaker 7: they still maintain with people outside of like two people
Speaker 7: on my team is pretty startling. Whereas I've worked with
Speaker 7: a lot of other captive wild canids and and they
Speaker 7: are go, oh, person equals food and they come running
Speaker 7: over all right. That these guys do not have that.
Speaker 7: There is a real fear of new people, new things.
Speaker 7: They how like they do, Yeah, they do. They They
Speaker 7: have a good howl. There's really you know, famous video
Speaker 7: that we put on YouTube that was their first howl,
Speaker 7: which was pretty powerful moment for the team, you know,
Speaker 7: sitting there holding them in one of the vetexs that
Speaker 7: works in the clinic we were giving we were doing
Speaker 7: a check up on them. It was like singing a song,
Speaker 7: a little mermaid song, and there's a part where it's like, uh,
Speaker 7: and she starts doing that, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 7: both boys just popped into a howl. That was pretty
Speaker 7: pretty incredible.
Speaker 2: Is their body size on track with what you'd expect
Speaker 2: the body signs of a dire wolf to be.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so we're looking you know, fossil record kind of
Speaker 7: suggests dire wolves were somewhere between that one hundred and
Speaker 7: thirty hundred forty pounds up to one hundred and sixty pounds.
Speaker 7: I think we're on pace for one hundred and forty pounds.
Speaker 7: Where we stand today, we're seven and a half months
Speaker 7: as shy of one hundred pounds. As is, their growth
Speaker 7: curve is definitely leveling out. But you know what we
Speaker 7: know from gray wolves is we could expect them to
Speaker 7: continue to grow until they're about twelve fifteen months and
Speaker 7: then from there they'll continue to put on weight. But
Speaker 7: they're they're pretty hall leggy animals as they are today.
Speaker 1: M I'm excited for this Ivory build woodpecker situation.
Speaker 7: Well yeah, I mean we gotta we got to get
Speaker 7: you down to the lab and we can show you
Speaker 7: what we're doing with with the woodpecker stuff.
Speaker 2: You know who else wouldn't like it to see? For
Speaker 2: the people who claim they see them now because they
Speaker 2: kind of they're like special.
Speaker 7: We get that on the thighlasting project too.
Speaker 1: Oh don't need Yeah, there's one behind my own.
Speaker 7: We were at a town hall meeting because we we
Speaker 7: will visit Tasmani and have town halls and try to
Speaker 7: hear from from the locals, and we have it at
Speaker 7: that Thilasting stakeholder group and one of them said, you know,
Speaker 7: I this is ten years ago. I was pumpkin gas
Speaker 7: down at this intersection. I saw one run by you.
Speaker 7: It's like, I don't want to be rude, but if
Speaker 7: they do exist, I don't think they're visiting gas stations.
Speaker 1: Yea, yeah, do you guys use that term Lazarus? We haven't.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but it's good. It's a good analogy.
Speaker 1: I was going to get to this before we're running
Speaker 1: out of time, but uh, Crystal ballt on Crystal Ball
Speaker 1: at on Tasmania saying hell, yeah, let's cut some thiosines loose.
Speaker 7: I think the chances will go much higher once we
Speaker 7: have a thioasine in hand, because I think there will
Speaker 7: suddenly be oh, this is a real thing that we
Speaker 7: need to be very serious about. Australia has a very
Speaker 7: conservative approach to wildlife management, and they've been burned.
Speaker 3: They don't have any non natives.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, they've been burned in the past. Right, Cane
Speaker 7: toads a great example.
Speaker 1: I can see that.
Speaker 7: So I think there will be an onerous owner's process
Speaker 7: in order to get there. But I would say, yeah,
Speaker 7: you know, you know, that's sort of seventy five eighty
Speaker 7: five percent chance that they will definitely come along. I
Speaker 7: think Mauritius is much more willing to take that.
Speaker 1: What was the percent chance on Tasmania seventy five eighty five?
Speaker 1: Really optimistic.
Speaker 7: I'm telling you, what's these animals are back? I think, well,
Speaker 7: he'll be fighting people to say why is it in
Speaker 7: Texas in the United States and not in Tasmania.
Speaker 1: I love Willem Dafoe. One of the worst movies ever made.
Speaker 1: His style of scene movie, it's really bad. Just the logic.
Speaker 1: They had magical backpack syndrome.
Speaker 2: What is that?
Speaker 1: Magical backpack syndrome is a person has a little knapsack.
Speaker 2: Inducing like all sorts of ships.
Speaker 7: It's like a Harry Potter bag and I just keep
Speaker 7: pulling stuff out of it.
Speaker 3: And it's it's just the logic.
Speaker 1: It was like a great They're like, we should do something,
Speaker 1: or the idea is we should do something around Tasmanian times,
Speaker 1: and then that's just what came out in the end. Terrible.
Speaker 3: I assume on the show.
Speaker 1: I'd love to have.
Speaker 2: I assume your company has competitors. Have they Have they
Speaker 2: been excited for you guys? Have they been critical of
Speaker 2: what you've done? Are they like, damn, we thought we'd
Speaker 2: land on the moon first.
Speaker 7: I think it's I'm aware we're the only the extinction
Speaker 7: species preservations.
Speaker 2: Nobody else, the only people.
Speaker 7: We truly compete with the other nation states. You know,
Speaker 7: Korea has pursued some of the stuff. We know China
Speaker 7: has an interest in it, but it's not really at
Speaker 7: a company level. I think you're acutey. I think you're
Speaker 7: about to see people come in, but they're about four
Speaker 7: hundred and fifty million dollars in five years late.
Speaker 1: Are you guys constantly suns discouraged?
Speaker 6: Are you guys constantly getting like petitioned by people or
Speaker 6: or organizations about like their pet the extinction project or
Speaker 6: their pet project to prevent something from their animal.
Speaker 7: You know what we get. We get a lot of
Speaker 7: that where it's you know, hey, THI listen, is a
Speaker 7: really cool project. But did you consider about like the
Speaker 7: red pilliated northwest woodpecker. Right, it's like some random bird
Speaker 7: that you got well I didn't actually let me look
Speaker 7: it up, and you go, well, it's not really just
Speaker 7: extirpaated from that area. It's still lounge. Yeah, right there,
Speaker 7: you get a lot of that type of stuff.
Speaker 3: Dude, Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 7: Man, Hey, always great to be here. You guys, come
Speaker 7: on time you want I appreciate that, because I'll take
Speaker 7: you up on that, because you know, we're working in
Speaker 7: Yellowstone on a pretty regular basis now, so we're up
Speaker 7: in your neck of the woods.
Speaker 2: People aren't gonna like to hear that.
Speaker 1: I don't think.
Speaker 7: Well, if you're not dire related.
Speaker 1: Let me give you my end, let me give you
Speaker 1: my end sentiment about the whole thing. I think there's
Speaker 1: things that happen in American culture, global culture, whatever. There's
Speaker 1: things that happen to make everyone dumber, and there's things
Speaker 1: that happen to make everyone smarter. Right, this is definitely
Speaker 1: whatever ends up happening, like whatever happens with romulus and remissing,
Speaker 1: like whatever happened. This made everybody smarter because everybody said, wow,
Speaker 1: I never really thought about what is a species? What
Speaker 1: is de extinction? How do you define a blank? Is
Speaker 1: this okay or not okay? Like everyone got smarter and
Speaker 1: normally stuff happens. Every big is dumber.
Speaker 7: I love that. I'm going to steal that from you
Speaker 7: as well, because.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to get things that made everybody dumber.
Speaker 7: This isn't that positive.
Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, everybody got dumber.
Speaker 7: Yeah, people got a lot dumber TikTok. Yeah, net positive
Speaker 7: for the world. I think that's you know, if we're
Speaker 7: boiling down the story, this is a net positive because
Speaker 7: no one got hurt. Nobody got hurt. We're injecting, you know,
Speaker 7: we're injecting science into pop culture. We're injecting conservation where
Speaker 7: you know, if you look at Google search terms and
Speaker 7: hashtag trends from when we launched that first week, we
Speaker 7: saw all time highs of Google searches for red Wolf,
Speaker 7: for conservation, for the term extinction.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: You know, if we can push this into a dinner
Speaker 7: table conversation for families to have with their kids talk
Speaker 7: about the biodiversity crisis, that is a win in and
Speaker 7: of itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you didn't.
Speaker 1: But and the other thing is you didn't siphon off
Speaker 1: of limited federal spending. No, it was like willing seller,
Speaker 1: willing buyer, willing investor, willing investment.
Speaker 7: Ben loves to say, we spared the world in another
Speaker 7: shitty software company.
Speaker 5: I like that, right, I like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a potster, dude, but it made everybody smarter exactly. No,
Speaker 1: I like I like it. It's like it's like a
Speaker 1: real mental It causes a lot of mental wrestling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, what was that quote we had recently? That's
Speaker 1: the last thing I say. But it's not really applicable here,
Speaker 1: but I think we're Dan Floyda. No, it's a great quote.
Speaker 1: Dann Floyes was.
Speaker 3: Saying about historians.
Speaker 1: He goes, the reason the arguments are so the reason,
Speaker 1: it's like, the reason the arguments are so vicious is
Speaker 1: there's nothing at stake.
Speaker 3: But he was just making a joke about his own.
Speaker 1: Discipline as a historian, you know, like, how could people
Speaker 1: get so worked up about Clovis first or whatever? Right,
Speaker 1: But there's something at steak here. But I think the
Speaker 1: main thing is it's like, not the main thing. It's
Speaker 1: just fun to watch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate that. It's fun to watch.
Speaker 1: People like all of a sudden arguing about stuff that
Speaker 1: the day before they didn't know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's perfect.
Speaker 6: You guys should do an Irish el connect.
Speaker 7: I won't tell you we're not going.
Speaker 5: Hunters would love that. Diarls could eat him.
Speaker 7: It works for me.
Speaker 1: He's got the amusement part figured out, all right. Thanks man,
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you coming.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Thank you