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With only 40 Marsican brown bears left in Italy, the species is on the brink of extinction. One scientist has a controversial plan to prevent its extinction - to clone it. And, he doesn't want to stop there.
In the beech forests of central Italy's Abruzzo National Park, roughly 40 native Marsican brown bears are struggling against the threat of extinction.
Since the 1980s, half of the Marsican brown bear population here has been lost to urban expansion. The bears have been poached, poisoned by traps set for other animals, or killed in traffic accidents. And, while there have been attempts to revive its population using EU funding and various protective strategies, Marsican bear numbers continue to decline.
Pasqualino Loi, Professor of Biomedicine at the University of Teramo in Italy, believes that in order to save the Marsican brown bear, it should be cloned.
"The Marsican bear is dying out and at least this way there will be bears available for mating in the habitat at all," Loi told DW.
Loi led Europe's last cloning experiment with an endangered animal back in 2001, which saw a Mouflon wild sheep cloned. The animal died within six months of birth. He's already planning the preliminary in-vitro phase of cloning the Marsican bear, using cell samples from a dead bear recently found on an Italian highway.
Using a dog to get a bear
With the same technique used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996, the process involves producing and then transplanting a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated ovary of a genetically similar surrogate animal.
"We need a foster mother like a large dog such as a Schnauzer or St Bernard, dogs which are genetic cousins of the bear," explains Loi.
If successful, Loi suggests the dog could deliver up to six to eight cloned baby bears.
But even if the Marsican brown bear could be successfully cloned, there's the still the issue of genetic variability. When an animal's population in the wild becomes too small, it's genetic diversity decreases beyond the point of recovery.
And with only a few Marsican bears left, their gene pool is already limited. Given that the female bear only breeds every three to four years, some say the new cloning idea doesn't aid the bear's chances of survival much either.
But, irrespective of its low genetic variability, Loi insists the Marsican brown bear would have a higher chance of survival, if it were cloned.
"The cloned population would be stronger simply because a disease can't kill all of them. Isn't it better to have 4000 bears with less genetic variability than no bears at all?" Loi asks.
- dw.de
In the beech forests of central Italy's Abruzzo National Park, roughly 40 native Marsican brown bears are struggling against the threat of extinction.
Since the 1980s, half of the Marsican brown bear population here has been lost to urban expansion. The bears have been poached, poisoned by traps set for other animals, or killed in traffic accidents. And, while there have been attempts to revive its population using EU funding and various protective strategies, Marsican bear numbers continue to decline.
Pasqualino Loi, Professor of Biomedicine at the University of Teramo in Italy, believes that in order to save the Marsican brown bear, it should be cloned.
"The Marsican bear is dying out and at least this way there will be bears available for mating in the habitat at all," Loi told DW.
Loi led Europe's last cloning experiment with an endangered animal back in 2001, which saw a Mouflon wild sheep cloned. The animal died within six months of birth. He's already planning the preliminary in-vitro phase of cloning the Marsican bear, using cell samples from a dead bear recently found on an Italian highway.
Using a dog to get a bear
With the same technique used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996, the process involves producing and then transplanting a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated ovary of a genetically similar surrogate animal.
"We need a foster mother like a large dog such as a Schnauzer or St Bernard, dogs which are genetic cousins of the bear," explains Loi.
If successful, Loi suggests the dog could deliver up to six to eight cloned baby bears.
But even if the Marsican brown bear could be successfully cloned, there's the still the issue of genetic variability. When an animal's population in the wild becomes too small, it's genetic diversity decreases beyond the point of recovery.
And with only a few Marsican bears left, their gene pool is already limited. Given that the female bear only breeds every three to four years, some say the new cloning idea doesn't aid the bear's chances of survival much either.
But, irrespective of its low genetic variability, Loi insists the Marsican brown bear would have a higher chance of survival, if it were cloned.
"The cloned population would be stronger simply because a disease can't kill all of them. Isn't it better to have 4000 bears with less genetic variability than no bears at all?" Loi asks.
- dw.de
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