Giant moa revival a marvellous obligation for Kiwis

2 days ago

The giant South Island moa stood up to 3.6m tall with its neck outstretched and weighed about 230kg.
The headline's up there with Fiordland moose sightings.
'Project to de-extinct moa'.
But no, it's kosher.
A trailblazing genetic-engineering project, backed by movie director Sir Peter Jackson and iwi Ngāi Tahu, proposes to bring the extinct South Island giant moa back from the dead.
Work on the dramatic Jurassic Park -style

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Otago Daily Times

16 hours ago

Otago Daily Times

Extinction may be no moa?

Most of us have lost someone dear. It's unhappily the way of things, that in the midst of life we are indeed in death. Who wouldn't give pots of money or anything they owned for even a short time more with a loved one who has died? Instead, we are left with the hurt and sorrow, the feeling we have lost part of ourselves. In the animal kingdom, whole orders and families of creatures have died out, many of them as a result of human behaviour. They have been killed by hunting and by introduced predators, and because we have destroyed their habitat directly by burning or through ongoing insidious changes to their food sources, including plant distribution, as a consequence of climate change. What if we could really bring these animals back somehow, rather than just in our minds? You might say we owe them that at least. Could we start with moa? That's the idea which has burst through into the media this week, courtesy of United States biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, Ngāi Tahu, Canterbury Museum and film-maker Sir Peter Jackson. Through the use of genetic engineering and DNA in preserved moa remains, they believe South Island giant moa hatchlings could be restored to life in less than eight years. New Zealand has a shocking roll call of species which have become extinct since the first Polynesians arrived some time in the late 13th century. Those settlers were accompanied by the Pacific rat, kiore, which exterminated some bird species, and then Europeans arrived some 500 years later with their deadly cargo of stoats, ferrets, weasels, Norway rats and ship rats. New Zealand ornithologist Dr Richard Holdaway says during about 750 years of human settlement the number of vertebrate species has nearly halved, including the losses of one type of bat, more than 50 birds, three frogs and three lizards, and a freshwater fish. Moa were hunted to extinction by about the early 1400s. Prominent Catlins archaeologist Les Lockerbie proved that those early settlers from Polynesia were responsible for wiping out moa by discovering moa bones next to moa-bone fish-hook points, necklace reels and pendants in coastal excavations. This new plan to "de-extinct" moa has excited a great deal of attention. The idea would be that the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre would oversee the project and own the moa, to be kept on an ecological reserve. Sir Peter is cock-a-hoop at the prospect of success. He says it follows his long-held dream that many scientific wonders might become something more tangible during his lifetime. Paul Scofield, the Canterbury Museum's senior curator of natural history, is also excited about working with Colossal Biosciences, which is also trying to resurrect the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth. Thousands of genes would be required to rebuild the bird's brain, feathers, eyesight and other characteristics. A related living species would then act as a genetic surrogate. However, a dose of reality has been injected into the scheme by University of Otago scientists, including paleogenetics laboratory director Assoc Prof Nic Rawlence. He points to Colossal's supposedly de-extincted dire wolf, which was actually a genetically engineered grey wolf. In the case of the moa, he believes they will simply be creating a GE emu or similar, which might look like a moa but may not function like one. There would also be serious ethical concerns. At least 500 individuals would be needed to avoid dangerous in-breeding — that is, if they are actually able to breed. As well, Prof Rawlence is questioning the level of iwi engagement. While carrying out genome-sequencing on the moa, scientists from the paleogenetics lab have found no appetite from individual rūnanga across the South Island to bring back moa. He says it might also be a better use of the company's technology to use genetic engineering to help strengthen and conserve animals now on the endangered list. We agree. There can be no doubting it would be absolutely incredible were moa to walk the earth again after more than 500 years. But energy, technology and money would be much better used in saving our endangered species right now, rather than attempting to reverse the arrow of time.

RNZ News

a day ago

RNZ News

First the dire wolf, now NZ's giant moa: why real ‘de-extinction' is unlikely to fly

By By Nic Rawlence* of Photo: Supplied / Colossal Biosciences Analysis - The announcement that New Zealand's moa nunui (giant moa) is the next "de-extinction" target for Colossal Biosciences, in partnership with Canterbury Museum , the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre and filmmaker Peter Jackson, caused widespread alarm among scientists. This follows the US company's recreation of a "dire wolf", which was essentially a genetically engineered grey wolf. But that project was probably easy compared to the latest plan to resurrect the moa. I think it's a pipe dream and there are several reasons why. Firstly, birds are harder to "de-extinct" than placental mammals. One would need a surrogate egg to bring chicks to term, and for many moa species there are no eggs from living birds big enough to house a developing chick. In this case, artificial eggs would need to be developed. Then there is evolutionary history. From my own work and the research of others , we know the moa is most closely related to the tinamou , a small flying bird in South America. To get to the common ancestor of the moa and tinamou, you'd have to go back some 60 million years of evolution. That's a lot of time for mutations to evolve in genes controlling how moa look, that would need to be re-engineered to bring back moa traits. The evolutionary history of the palaeognath group is even deeper. Formerly known as ratites, this group includes the tinamou and lineages of living flightless birds (emu, kiwi, cassowary, rhea, ostrich) and extinct ones (New Zealand's moa and Madagascar's elephant birds). Genetically engineering a tinamou or any other birds in this group to create a moa hybrid would be challenging given this deep evolutionary timescale - certainly much harder than genetically engineering a grey wolf. And in any case, this would not recreate a moa, but merely something that may look like a moa. As one critic put it, it would not have the mauri (life force) of a moa. There are no living analogues of moa within the palaeongath group. We don't know whether birds created through de-extinction methods would function like a moa in the ecosystem. Moa are unique, even among other flightless birds, in that they had no wings - all other flightless birds still have remnant wings. As a start, any genetic engineering would need to target regions of the genome that control the expression of genes for wing formation. This could have unintended consequences. I'm involved in an ongoing project to sequence high-quality genomes of several species of moa in New Zealand to study their evolutionary history. In our conversations with tangata whenua around the country, there has been no support for de-extinction. Iwi (tribes) also want moa bone samples and all DNA extracts and sequence data to stay in New Zealand. A major question is whether Colossal has undertaken wider engagement. Ngāi Tahu is a very large iwi with lots of individual rūnanga (tribal councils) throughout the South Island. My research team has engaged with individual rūnanga, and we know they are opposed to de-extinction. I would like Colossal, Canterbury Museum and the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre to disclose how widely they consulted across Ngāi Tahu. The numerous iwi at the top of the South Island are also against the de-extinction of the giant moa (or any moa) which also lived in their rohe (region). De-extinction of a giant moa would really need a South Island-wide or even national consensus before going ahead. Māori have expressed longstanding concerns about not being involved in discussions about genetic engineering and the potential of bone samples or genetic material going offshore. With this announcement, it's encouraging to see the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre is driving the project and that there are discussions around the need to restore habitat that would be suitable for moa. This is a challenge in its own right as there is little left. Parts of the eastern South Island were once covered in mosaics of open forest shrubland that were dominated by kowhai and lancewood , which have no analogue today. Even if we were to bring back an extinct species and kept individuals in a game reserve, we would need to produce enough (at least 500) to avoid inbreeding and genetic drift (random loss or retention of genes in a population). The birds would require sufficient funding for their ongoing conservation. This raises worries that money could be pulled from efforts to save living endangered species, pushing them closer to extinction. It's undeniable the genetic engineering technology Colossal is developing could have real benefits to the conservation of New Zealand's endangered species. Let's say we could genetically engineer a kākāpō so it becomes resistant to a disease. That's perhaps a project worth doing if there was widespread community support. Investing the money that goes into this project in the conservation of New Zealand's currently endangered biodiversity would, in my view, be better than bringing back moa as an ecotourism venture. *Nic Rawlence is an associate professor in ancient DNA at University of Otago -This story was originally published on The Conversation.

NZ Herald

2 days ago

NZ Herald