We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species. Is It Worth the Cost?

Scientists disagree about whether bringing extinct species back from the dead will result in a net loss of global biodiversity.

“If you have the millions of dollars it would take to resurrect a species and choose to do that, you are making an ethical decision to bring one species back and let several others go extinct,” Dr. Bennett said.

In their study, Dr. Bennett and his collaborators tried to approximate the costs of re-establishing and maintaining 16 species that went extinct in the last millennium, including the Lord Howe pigeon and Eastern rat-kangaroo from Australia, and the laughing owl and Waitomo frog from New Zealand.

Because the price of genetically reconstructing extinct species is still unknown, the scientists focused on how much it would cost just to reintroduce and maintain these particular species in the wild once they had already been engineered.

In New Zealand, the researchers calculated, the funds required to conserve 11 extinct species would protect three times as many living species.

In New South Wales, reviving five extinct species was similar to saving more than eight times as many living species.

Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, and author of the controversial book “The Population Bomb,” said that conservation is vastly underfunded and there is no guarantee that restoring extinct species will work.

Source: We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species. Is It Worth the Cost?

Originally published at Cogly.