A Chinese pet-cloning company has announced the birth of the world’s first cloned Arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos), which was carried to term by an unlikely surrogate mother – a beagle.
The cloned female wolf pup, named Maya, and her beagle mother were unveiled to the world in a brief video at a press conference held September 19 by the Sinogene Biotechnology Company in Beijing, according to Chinese news site Global Times.
The video was released 100 days after Maya was born: on June 10 in a laboratory in Beijing, according to Sinogene representatives.
Normally, Sinogene specializes in Clinton dead pets, such as cats, dogs, and horses, for private clients.
But the company now wants to use its expertise to help clone endangered species for conservation purposes, Global Times reported.
Maya was cloned using DNA collected from a fully grown Arctic wolf, also named Maya, that died in captivity at Harbin Polarland, a wildlife park in northeast China.
The original Maya, who was born in Canada before being shipped to China in 2006, died due to old age in early 2021, according to Global Times.
Cloning endangered animals
Despite reports from Global Times and other media outlets, Arctic wolves, which are a subspecies of gray wolves (Canis lupus) are not an endangered species. Instead, they are listed as least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, though climate change is likely to severely disrupt their food supply in the wild in coming decades, according to WWF.
But endangered species have been cloned by scientists before.
In 2020, scientists from US-based company Revive & Restore successfully cloned an endangered black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes).
That same year, the company also successfully cloned an endangered Przewalski’s horse (Equus przewalskii), and their technicians are now attempting to revive the extinct passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) using cloning technology.
“Cloning is a drastically underutilized tool,” Ben Novak, lead scientist at Revive & Restore, told Live Science in an email. “In the future, it could be a literal lifeline for species that become rarer or worse, go extinct.”
The main benefit of cloning endangered species is that it maintains the amount of genetic diversity within a species, Novak said.
If the clones can reproduce with other non-cloned individuals, this gives threatened species a fighting chance to adapt to the selection pressures that are driving them towards extinction, he added.
Another benefit of cloning is that it can be used in conjunction with existing captive-breeding programs, especially when surrogate mothers from other species are used, Novak said.
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