News of the world's first cloned wolves didn't impress Peter Siminski, director of conservation and education at the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert, California.
Cloning is not the answer for saving wolves in the wild, he said.
"The primary [conservation effort] has to do with reducing conflicts with humans and maintaining habitat that has sufficient prey for wolves," he said.
By the early 20th century, U.S.-government-sponsored predator control programs, along with declines in prey, brought gray wolves near extinction in the lower 48 states.
The predators were granted federal protection in 1967.
Now, 40 years later, these wild canines are thriving in several states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
In February the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the western Great Lakes population of gray wolves from the federal endangered species list.
(Read related: "Wolves to Be Hunted if Removed From U.S. Endangered List" [February 5, 2007].)
But Mexican wolves, a subspecies of the gray wolf that experts say nearly went extinct in the early 1980s, are still federally protected.
About 60 Mexican wolves now roam the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, thanks to a successful reintroduction effort by the U.S. government and private conservation organizations.
Sue Lindsey is executive director of the Wild Canid Survival and Research Center located outside of Saint Louis, Missouri.
She says her facility has produced more Mexican wolf puppies than any other and has successfully reintroduced them into the wild.
But she's not convinced cloning will help facilities like hers.
"Any one animal cannot repopulate a species," Lindsey said.
"Even if you clone several of these animals …, I'd be concerned about there being enough robust [genetic] material out there in the wild that [the population] would survive."
African Wildlife Cloned
Betsy Dresser, director of Audubon Nature Institute's Center for Research of Endangered Species, believes cloning is simply part of a tool kit for saving a species when it becomes critically endangered.
"You see dinosaurs and wooly mammoths in textbooks, and I don't want to see that with elephants, rhinos, and tigers—animals that we could have done something about while they were here," she said.
Her lab in New Orleans has cloned an African wild cat and an Arabian sand cat. Researchers there are now trying to duplicate a bongo, an endangered species of antelope (see and download a picture of a bongo.)
The lab includes a "frozen zoo," one of only a handful of facilities in the country that banks genetic material from endangered species.
"The wild is becoming smaller and smaller," Dresser said. "This is an opportunity for us to put together a living library of genetics via these cells."
All that's needed is a skin cell sample, which can be obtained from both wild and captive animals.
Once frozen, the cells can be preserved for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, she said.
"We don't know what the technology is going to be one hundred years from now," Dresser said. "But what we do know is that you'll have living tissue that will be able to be revived."
At the San Diego Zoo, the 25-year-old skin cells of an Asian bovine called a bangtang were thawed a few years ago to duplicate the species.
According to Oliver Ryder, an endangered species expert at the zoo, the goal wasn't simply to produce an animal that died decades ago. It was to introduce a new animal into a small population that was losing genetic variation.
"The potential of cloning is intriguing," he said. "But it's been very little tested in terms of its practical application."
The most compelling thing to do right now, Ryder added, is to continue banking the genetic material of endangered species.
"The way to preserve endangered species is to preserve them in their habitat," Ryder said.
"But the fact is, those of us interested in conservation are watching species disappear in spite of efforts to conserve their habitats. So the future's interests are best served by having a variety of options available."
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