Cloning and instinct

Factual Questions
1

I was reading this article that wondered aloud which extinct species we should bring back - if we had the ability. It mused about woolly mammoths roaming the arctic again. And it got me wondering, would cloning an extinct animal preserve it’s instincts for finding food, for example?

Full discloser, I don’t know much about cloning nor have I thought about instinct much but it seems weird that all the things that animals do instinctually could be passed along in DNA. But I guess must.

Does DNA contain future instinctual behaviors?

3

All the heritable information is in the DNA, including brain structure and instinctive behavior. But DNA floating around in space is no more use than a computer hard drive floating around in space. The information in the DNA is only accessed correctly when the DNA is inside a zygote of that species that then develops in the uterus of a mother of that species. That environment contains critical information too. So there’s a Catch-22 there, and contrary to popular belief derived from the movies you can’t just resurrect an extinct species from DNA alone.

In the case of a mammoth, we have the closely related elephant. So if you had the mammoth DNA and you could work out all the technical details you could probably replace the elephant DNA in the nucleus of an elephant zygote with mammoth DNA and grow that in an elephant mother to produce something that resembles a mammoth, including mammoth instinctive behaviors. But it would be impossible to know if were exactly the same as a mammoth.

4

By definition instinctual behaviours are those which do need to be learned. So the answer is ‘yes’.

More specifically, woolly mammoths were herbivores, and grass is kind of omnipresent and rarely runs away. And I imagine that it smells and tastes yummy to herbivores, so cloned mammoths shouldn’t have trouble figuring it out.

Lots of other animals, eg. insects, reptiles, fish etc don’t get a lot in the way of parenting, so they must be able to hunt instinctively.

5

If you have plenty of time I recommend Robert Zapolsky’s Lectures from the Stanford University on YouTube. In a nutshell: it is incredibly complicated. All the information must be in the DNA, but it takes all kind of epigenetic contributions to activate them (or suppress them), there are reinforcing loops and unexpected recursivities. I doubt even something as close as an elephant would give birth to a real mammoth, real being “as they used to be”. I guess it would be some sort of a new species with a new behaviour. The environement has changed too. The first mammoth would probably miss a herd, so the second and third mammoth would have to cope with a neurotic First Mammoth; that should have consequences for them as well, etc. etc…

6

Despite thier name herbivores do not necessarily eat grass, some eat foliage or marine algae or fruits… A dinosaur, who used to eat fern trees from the Carbonifeous period, would likely starve to death in the middle of our current forests. And not all grasses are equal and some are more equal than others.
And I guess you forgot a “not” between “do” and “need”, otherwise the answer would be “no”.

7

When you clone an animal, it’s not an exact twin of the DNA “parent”; it has the mitochondrial DNA of the ovum donor, so our mammoth will have the nuclear DNA of a mammoth, but the mDNA of an elephant. mDNA probably will not affect the appearance of the mammoth-- unless it affects it developmentally. mDNA doesn’t code for features, but it does have a lot to do with metabolism. We don’t know how similar elephant metabolism is to a mammoth’s.

Also, I’m personally not sure to what degree the demands of a cell are met, and to what degree the mDNA dictates what a cell can have. I do know that there are disorders of the mitochondria that result in profound disability, then death. So in those cases, the mDNA are “in charge,” but they are also not normal; what goes for them may not go for all mDNA.

There’s really no way to know how much like an elephant’s metabolism a mammoth’s is, but mammoths lived during an ice age, and elephants live in warm climates. That’s got to make a difference. But like I said, it may be that cells get what they want, for the most part. However, if they don’t, and they get what mDNA are willing to give, then a mammoth with elephant mDNA may essentially have a mitochondrial disorder, resulting in a short, painful life.

We don’t need mammoths.

However, that being said, in a fantasy world, where we didn’t have to worry about mDNA, I’d bring back the Dodo. Here’s why:

On Mauritius Island, where the Dodo lived, there a tree, called Calvaria major, which is going extinct, but is not yet, because it relied on the Dodo to eat and metabolize the hard shell on its seeds, before they could sprout. People have tried other ways to sprout Calvaria trees, and it is extremely difficult and labor-intensive, and fails a lot. Calvaria really only thrives in Mauritius soil, and there may be something enzymatic about the Dodo alimentary tract that helped the seeds sprout as well.

If we bring back the Dodo, and repopulate Mauritius, we can save the Calvaria.

So, I vote for the Dodo.

But really, I don’t think we should be doing this at this point in our knowledge about the role of mDNA.

8

I think the “not” was eaten by some kind of web goblin. :neutral_face:

And it’s reasonable to assume that we’re placing these cloned animals in suitable environments. They obviously cannot find food which doesn’t actually exist.

9

Cloned mammoths probably would have their instinctive behaviors. But mammals in general, and elephants in particular, are fairly intelligent, and have a high degree of parenting, which means that a lot of what they need to know is learned, and that would all be lost.

What do you need to know to be a mammoth? I don’t know; ask a mammoth.

10

There was a NPR story on a farmer cloning his favorite bull : it turns out, the cloned bull had a very bad temperament.

Couldn’t find that specific story, but FDA confirms it : https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/animal-cloning/myths-about-cloning

“## Myth: Clones have exactly the same temperament and personality as the animals from which they were cloned.”

11

Listened to the first one during the morning treadmill session. Very interesting. Thanks.

12

Here you go - If By Chance We Meet Again - This American Life

13

Thank you

14

I don’t know. If the issue is that the seed needs to pass through the dodo’s gut, wouldn’t you probably also need to clone the gut microbes?

Which I suspect would also be an issue with a cloned mammoth. I doubt the gut microbes of an ice age mammoth match up particularly well with the gut microbes of a modern elephant, or with anything the mammoth clone would be able to pick up from the present environment. Although, maybe the modern gut microbes it picks up would be better suited to digesting modern flora. In any event, I suspect a cloned mammoth would have a lot of digestive issues.

15

Normally, the mother mammal teaches its young what to eat and how. I watched a show where the mother elephant taught its baby how to suck water in its trunk. Probably went down the wrong way at first. If you cloned a mammoth for example, it wouldn’t grow up alone in a vacuum, it would have other elephants to learn from.

16

Sure, some of the things you need to know to be a mammoth are similar to the things you need to know to be an elephant, and so an elephant foster-mother could teach some of it. But I’m sure there would be differences, too.

17

It’s a bootstrapping problem. The first cloned mammoths are born to Asian elephants. (Note that Asian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than they are to African elephants.) The most mammothy of those are bred together, so that the next generation is born to mammoths. Keep repeating and the original imprints from the elephants will be bred out.

I imagine that Mammoth mitochondria will have to be cloned as well as the nuclear DNA.

18

Continuing the note, this means that cladistically mammoths are elephants.

19

Or that “elephant” as commonly used in English is a non monophyletic group. But I don’t think it should be surprising – a “wooly rhino” is considered a rhino. Why not a “wooly elephant”? The fact we don’t call mammoths that is just a coincidence of linguistics.

20

The issue of fetal development in the womb is a major one that we are only beginning to understand. Think of it this way. An elephant’s womb is a factory designed to build elephants. If you replace the factory blueprints with different blueprints, they may fail entirely (for example if you put a horse’s DNA into an elephant egg and implanted it in an elephant womb, it would fail to develop). So that’s why Asian elephants are promising candidates for surrogate mothers here – an elephant is similar enough to a mammoth that we hope, given the right blueprints, the elephant factory will be able to make a mammoth.

But the fact is that the act of reproduction is extremely complex. Consider the Liger. Born to a male lion and a female tiger, the Liger is enormous, growing larger than either parent. The Tigon, on the other hand, is born to a female lion and male tiger, and is often smaller than either parent. Why?

Part of it has to do with the DNA, and the way that evolutionary pressure acts differently on male and female lions because of their prides, where one male mates with many females, while solitary tigers face different selection pressure. But the evidence also shows that the lioness’ womb is simply a different environment from the tigeress’, and in a hybrid this interacts with the way the fetus develops and leads to these much larger Ligers.

Note that ligers continue growing later in life than other large cats, and this seems to have to do with their fetal development. What differences are there between a mammoth’s womb and an elephant’s? We don’t know. What effect will these differences have? We don’t know that, either.

The best we could do is to clone some and try to find out.

21

Many human-reared animals exhibit poor wild adaptation or just poor behavior. I imagine a cloned mammoth would have the same problem.

Hopefully an elephant’s behavior is close enough to that of a mammoth that elephants could raise them. They wouldn’t be 100% mammoth (some elephant behavior and elephant mitochondrial DNA) but they would be close.

I imagine some scientists will try to clone mammoths (and humans) to boost their ego, sort of like climbing Mount Everest. You don’t need to climb the mountain, but people will do so anyway, even though it’s dangerous and crowded.