Carrion Luggage

Dodo or Dodo Not (There Is No Try)

This conversation keeps coming back to life, this time courtesy of The Conversation:

    Dodo 2.0: how close are we to the return of this long extinct bird?  

Well, with the usual caveat that I'm not a biologist, I can answer that: we're about as close as we are to infinity.

Remember the other day, I talked about an AI meant to emulate the personality of a dead person? It's kind of like that, only with genetic manipulation instead of neural networks.

US biotech company [redacted] says it has finally managed to keep pigeon cells alive in the lab long enough to tweak their DNA – a crucial step toward its dream of recreating the dodo.

(Their name is redacted in this entry because they've been lawsuit-happy lately.)

And if they're not using actual dodo DNA, it gets even worse. Life is a continuum, and the extinction of a species breaks that continuum. At best, you get some very confused pigeons.

This is an achievement avian geneticists have chased for more than a decade.

Not to downplay the actual achievement here, which can be important to science in other ways, as the article notes.

Those cells, once edited, [redacted] spokespeople say, could be slipped into gene-edited chicken embryos, turning the chickens into surrogate mothers for birds that vanished more than 300 years ago.

Okay, some very confused chickpigeons.

Remember the hype over the "dire wolves" a few months back? Yeah. Same people. Also not dire wolves.

Almost everything we know about bird gene editing comes from chickens, whose germ cells (cells that develop into sperm or eggs) thrive in standard lab cultures. Pigeon cells typically die within hours outside the body.

Chickens are also tastier than pigeons. Contrary to popular belief, the dodo wasn't hunted to extinction   for its meat.

That process may create a bird that looks like a dodo, but genetics is only half the story. The draft dodo genome was pieced together from museum bones and feathers. Gaps were filled with ordinary pigeon DNA.

If this sounds familiar, yes, I know, Jurassic Park. Since birds are actually dinosaurs, I suppose this is life imitating art. Sort of.

Due to the fact it is extinct and cannot be studied we still don’t know much about the genes behind the dodo’s behaviour, metabolism and immune responses.

I had an English teacher in high school who would knock our grades down one letter every time we used "Due to the fact that..." in a paper.

Getting past that, though, yeah, what they said there. Plus, organisms don't exist on their own. They're part of an ecosystem. The ecosystem that supported the dodo has moved on.

There is also the matter of the chicken surrogate. A chicken egg weighs much less than a dodo egg would have. In museum collections there exists only one example of a Dodo egg, and that is similar in size to an ostrich egg.

Thus launching a whole new slew of "which came first?" jokes.

These caveats are why many biologists prefer the term “functional replacement” to “de-extinction”. What may hatch is a hybrid: mostly Nicobar pigeon, spliced with fragments of dodo DNA, gestated in a chicken.

And, really, I'd listen to biologists before I'd listen to me, here, and definitely before listening to a lawsuit-happy company with a vested interest in promoting their version of this.

The “dire wolf” puppies unveiled in August 2025 turned out to be grey-wolf clones with a few genetic tweaks.

Which all the biologists I follow were saying long before the puppies (more accurately cubs, but whatever) were born.

And conservationists have warned that such announcements tempt society to treat extinction as something that is reversible, meaning it is less urgent to prevent endangered species disappearing.

That's not a science problem; that's a PR problem.

Even so, the pigeon breakthrough could pay dividends for living species... Germ-cell culture offers a way to bank genetic diversity without maintaining huge captive flocks, and eventually to reintroduce that diversity into the wild.

Like I said, I'm not ragging on the science or the technological achievement, here. Just the claim that we're going to get dodos again, presumably so someone can put together a live-action Alice movie.

For Mauritius, any return of dodo-like birds must start with the basics of island conservation. It will be necessary to eradicate rats (which preyed on dodos), control invasive monkeys and restore native forest.

That's a rather tall order, considering that it's damn near impossible to eradicate rats. New York City tried. They even appointed a "rat czar," which I found extremely amusing, because it conjured up images of a giant Russian rat. Anyway, the rat czar resigned in disgrace, and the rat population of NYC continues to increase.

But in the strictest sense, the actual 17th-century dodo is beyond recovery.

Not just the strictest sense. In any sense (except that of marketing and PR). But, as I (and the article) keep repeating, there are other benefits to the research.

I just feel bad for the living results of the process.