![]() in fact, we could try anything it may be worth it. So I'm not saying reintroduction is a bad thing. Unfortunately, geneticists and biologists (and in fact few conservationists) understand how animals connect to ecosystems and the interrelatedness of these processes. If you remove the species and leave it a couple of hundred years, the ecosystem changes and the cultural knowledge that was based on thousands of years of system to-ing and fro-ing, is lost. There is no linear version of this, the two have co-existed forever. The processes of ecosystem function and animal connectivity and culture, developed together. The oak forests that exist, were built by the passenger pigeons. There is another big dimension that is forgotten though. Culture is developed through connectivity with your environment and learning how to 'read' it - that gets passed into complex socio-ecological systems that we hardly understand but genetics only provides the framework. The things you mention: chicks that fly the nest and know where to go. The ecosystem science aspects of these proposals always seem to be omitted in favour of genetics which only really encode for basic function but not biodiversity outcomes - they are driven by thermodynamics and natural selection and cannot be engineered. Which does rather beg the question, if it’s better to focus on recovery of extant and declining species that already retain some cultural normality. ![]() I think it’s more likely, if this is successful, that they’ll end up with another species that has no more or less chance of survival than any other existing endangered species and will develop a new ecology of its own, which is entirely unpredictable due to the complex nature of ecosystems. So introducing a new species (any species) will result in an uncertain outcome due to hysteresis principles. Entropy processes are both barriers and enablers of ecosystem function and animals are inherently tied to those systems. I reckon it takes 10,000-25,000 years for wild animal populations to fully develop cultural connection to ecosystems. ![]() It’s exciting but perhaps I am a little cynical. ![]()
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