Is the Tassie Tiger Finally Making a Comeback?
Is the Tassie Tiger Finally Making a Comeback?
DYOR Dave
The Tasmanian tiger has been extinct for almost 90 years, but a group of Aussie scientists at Aiden Lab’s ‘DNA Zoo’ have just reached a significant milestone in the race to bring it back.
Thanks to its distant cousin and fellow marsupial, the Numbat, Tassie Tigers could soon be running around the southern island in our lifetime.
Numbats themselves are under threat of extinction, and as researchers have been decoding the full genome of the numbat, its similarities to the Tassie tiger were more than apparent.
Sharing as much as 95% of DNA, the full-length 3D genome map of the numbat will help scientists to fill in the gaps to create a full genome of the tiger, along with already collected genomes from preserved samples.
The numbat and the thylacine share an ancestor that lived around 35 million years ago when Australia and Tasmania were still connected and the marsupials roamed throughout the vast southern continent.
Since then, the numbats have resided in small pockets of Western Australia, and despite there being fewer than 1000 numbats left in the wild, this research will go a long way to helping those numbers rise in the near future.
With a complete sequencing of the Tiger’s DNA, scientists will be able to insert the full genetic blueprint into an embryo and key researcher Parwinder Kaur has said that this takes the idea “from science fiction to potential reality.”
Much of Tasmania’s wilderness is still largely untouched, so the Tigers should have no issue being reintroduced into the wild, and will in fact help restoration efforts through their hunting and eating habits.
With few other large predators, populations of Kangaroos and invasive species have been rising in the state, and a tiger would easily resume its place atop the food chain, while growing healthily in numbers.
The same cannot be said for researchers attempting to bring back the woolly mammoth using similar techniques with its distant relative, the Asian Elephant.
American Scientists are working towards creating what is essentially an Elephant-Mammoth hybrid, which will resemble more of an “arctic elephant” that can be introduced to colder climates like Siberia or Antarctica.
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