You bring up an interesting point, historical and current human activity and its effect on migration of organisms.
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Oh. In that case, I may pick bears. I donāt believe any have been sighted here since the 1960s. There is still a lot of forested area in the mountains, but people have sparsely settled most areas. The people would need to learn to share the land with bears, too.
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We have beavers in downtown Campbell, CA. I do not know their āofficialā history, but about 12 or so years ago, I had heard theyād made there way from the Santa Cruz mountains to Lexington reservoir. Now, theyāve made their way down the creeks and spillways. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/60837319
This is quite a heavily populated area the beavers have travelled through. There are busy recreational trails on both side of the creek from the reservoir at the foot of the mountains.
@upupa-epops Researchers at a local universities, The Puma Project, created a tracker that shows the movements of collared mountain lions in the area. I went to a talk they presented some years ago, and it great to hear about the project.
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In much of the Western world it seems!
Iād like to see Bison reintroduced to Manitoba. Huge, badass Bison, giant herds devastating farms and scaring the hell out of everyone. Reclaiming longrass prairie. Of course, they would simply be shot as pests, or a danger, like they were before. Sigh. One can only dreamā¦
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No question: Greater Prairie-Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido). My understanding is, this impressive species was last seen in Northwestern Ontario, Canada, in 1959. Sadly, Greater Prairie-Chicken is now listed as extirpated from the whole country.
There are two regions in Northwestern Ontario with the right habitat for Greater Prairie-Chicken: the Rainy River Valley, and, the farming areas between Dryden and Vermillion Bay in the Kenora District. The 1959 sighting was recorded west of Dryden.
My hope would be, reintroduced Prairie-Chickens could survive in the more remote grassland areas away from settlement. The related Sharp-tailed Grouse (Tympanuchus phasianellus) thrives here, so much so that Rainy River is the top location in Ontario to see Sharp-tails.
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Beaver are around San Luis Obispo County near the coast, but farmers or whomever break up the dams along Arroyo Grande Creek because it is used for agricultural irrigation. My friend saw them at one point.
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Yes. As a former Wisconsin resident, I agree there arenāt many places where Bison could roam free. American Burying Beetle is a good choice.
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The āBritish Solutionā would likely cost me and a few others our jobs, so it is going to have to be self-reintroduction.
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We are already busy with this at Tokai on the Cape Peninsula:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=125251&project_id=south-african-red-list-plants-extinct-and-extinct-in-the-wild&verifiable=any
Unfortunately, my list is huge!
https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/17071-extinct-and-threatened-in-cape-town
The problem is not as much reintroducing extinct species as trying to save the last patches of almost extinct species. Where will we āreintroduceā them when the last patch of their natural habitat is gone?
And this does not even include the Cape Lion, Cape Warthog, Bluebuck or Quagga (all RIP), and the chances of reintroducing Black Rhinos to Table Mountain are almost just as remote.
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The idea of taking reintroduction into oneās own hands is drastically irresponsible and immoral. You never know what another population of a formerly-native species could have in the way of different pathogens, habits, resistances, or even gut flora. The āBritish Solutionā being proposed is ridiculous.
ā¦That being said, I may or may not trade American Beavers (Castor canadensis) for North American Porcupines (Erethizon dorsatum)ā¦
āJokesā aside, I know of several occasions where unconventional reintroductions have been incredibly successful and those observing them ignorantly think that itās a natural rebound. Which is kind of hilarious, especially watching the distribution patterns fan out and clearly seeing where the nuclei are. I stand by the fact that itās harmful, but itās so hard for organizations (government or otherwise, especially) to jump through legal and societal hoops in order to make necessary changes through legislation, at least in time, in the middle of a very impactful mass extinction (especially regarding humans and our fellow large mammals).
Elk, bison, and cougars are some of the best examples, in my opinion. There is no excusable reason that they shouldnāt be literally everywhere in the Southern Appalachian Mountains (my home region), like they formerly were. But, here we areā¦
There is always an ethical concern about reintroduction, whether officially mediated or not, but the ecosystem is dynamic and has suffered many worse incidents than regaining an integral āfamily member.ā
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speaking of beavers. when I was a new engineer, my company sent me to visit a client municipality that had problems with their reservoir. Two years of drought, and increasing population had depleted their water supply. The city manager and the utilities director had been reduced to (illegally) dynamiting beaver dams upstream of the reservoir to release periodic surges of water to the pump station. They wanted the engineering company to study the feasibility of eradicating the beavers. An hourās walk around the reservoir with the blueprints revealed that in addition to creating a vast upstream reserve of water on the small stream, the beavers had also blocked some other streams in the upstream basin and effectively tripled the size of the townās reservoir.
I pointed out that if they eradicated the beavers by some means (not a trivial undertaking), the system of beaver dams would deteriorate and their reservoir capacity would shrink dramatically. They decided to live with their beavers. Yay! ;)
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Hmm, letās see: locally extinct large vertebrates in the Cape Town area and immediate surroundings I would like to see reintroduced ā¦
Leopard (on the peninsula itself), African lion, African elephant, black rhino, spotted hyena, African wild dog, common eland & ostrich (on the stretch of land that the city largely now covers), Cape Vulture, Cape warthog, black-backed jackal, hippopotamus (a very small population locally extant in Rondevlei, extinct in the other areas such as the Liesbeeck river, Rietvlei, Princess Vlei, etc), possibly bushbuck and bushpig (on the forested eastern slopes of Table Mountain).
Personally while the city is beautiful in its own way, I personally think the establishment of Cape Town was an ecological tragedy. Had the city never existed, I am sure by now the whole area including the Cape Flats would be a national park on the same level of fame and renown as Kruger National Park and other national parks (if not beating these outright).
I personally would not mind moving away from the area if it meant that the city were demolished and the whole area could be fully ecologically restored. Alas, that will never happen.
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Louisiana Pine Snake :(
Ocelots
red wolf
passenger pigeons
Black bear
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Old growth American chestnut forest would be awesome to see but even if the chestnuts can be brought back, that just wonāt happen during my lifetime. Locally, Iād love to find a white gentian - there are supposedly historical records but itās all a bit of a mystery and the plant hasnāt been seen in over a century.
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Interestingly de-extinction of mammoths (i.e cloning a single mammoth and keeping it in a zoo/breeding facility - not re-introducing it into the wild) has been proposed by modifying elephant DNA and gestating the embryo in an elephant. However I do believe mammoths would classify as an āinvasive speciesā today. They will probably beat competitors to extinction or simply die out once again because they trample one too many rice fields.
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Those created out of elephants surely will be something compeltely new, but there were ānormalā partial dna of it. Thereāre no competitors of that size in Arctic, they lived with modern species (plus some that are extinct too) and they were one of species who created that biome, but of course itās not gonna be easy as just releasing them even if there were actual mammoths in captivity. But really thereāre much easier solutions to the problem of warming other than getting mammoths back, though of course nobodyās gonna do that and process canāt be stopped no matter what.
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Curiousā¦ why a single mammoth dna contributor? Arenāt there quite a few potentially dna carrying mammoth remnants around?
I am thinking extremely narrowly about potential the mammoth revival - only thinking about how of much dna is harvestable from many specimens around the world. Not the broader questions of what animal would result or itās potential to restore (or not) ancient habitats or alter current habitats . Although those are very intriguing questions .
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I think @redpig meant producing one mammoth through cloning with that sentence.
My understanding for the Woolly Mammoth, Passenger Pigeon etc. de-extinction attempts there are no specimens with complete genomes because of degradation, so they canāt do normal cloning. The strategy is to find as many specimens as possible and combine their genomes to puzzle-piece one complete genome for the species.
Then they would compare that to the genome of the closest related still-living species and try to figure out which parts of the genome code for unique characteristics of the extinct species (I have no idea how you would do that, or how you would choose which traits matter).
Then you would take the genome of a living individual of the closely related species, replace parts of it with the important changes from the extinct species, and clone that living individual except with those changes made.
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Sigh, I suppose there are not enough Dodo remains around to even daydream about it.
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South-central Indiana. Weāre rooting for Ruffed Grouse. A few are to be found, but no stable breeding population.
We also need more beavers, for sure, but they are coming back. Apologies for being a bit off topic, but I highly recommend āEagerā by Ben Goldfarb, on beavers and their role as a keystone species. Journalistic in tone, but a great natural history.
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