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Colossal Biosciences, the company which bills itself as the world’s first de-extinction company, recently announced the de-extinction of the dire wolf, a Pleistocene animal which went extinct about 12,000 years ago.
Images and videos of genetically engineered mega wolves roaming a secret facility somewhere in North America are now flooding the internet, conjuring visions of Jurassic Park, only you can’t buy tickets. There aren’t any plans to open these animals up to public visitation. Still, there are already opposing arguments about the dire wolves’ existence. There are those who think the whole endeavor is a mistake, and others who are excited at the prospect of bringing back lost species.
Less controversial are the downstream impacts of de-extinction technologies, the sort of off-label conservation which can be supported by the same tools. In the same way that a runner training at high altitude runs more easily at sea level, any tool capable of returning an extinct species (or something quite like it) to the Earth can also help to conserve living species on the brink of extinction.
In fact, it’s already happening.
How de-extinction technologies used to bring back the dire wolf could benefit endangered red wolves
In the course of figuring out how to turn a gray wolf into a dire wolf, Colossal learned a few things with a direct impact on the most endangered wolf species on Earth. The de-extinction process begins with ancient DNA. In the case of the dire wolf project, Colossal scientists were working from two fossils, a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull.
The DNA provided the dire wolf genome, but that’s not enough, they also needed to know which genes were important. To find out, researchers compared the dire wolf genome with those of other canids, including jackals, foxes, dholes, and modern wolves. All in all, Colossal made 20 edits to the gray wolf genome and made puppies from the result.
The cloning process was relatively straightforward somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same process used in the creation of Dolly the sheep, with an important difference. Colossal pioneered a new blood cloning technique which allowed them to get epithelial progenitor cells (EPCs) from a simple blood draw, rather than needing a more invasive tissue sample.
That same blood cloning process which resulted in the Colossal dire wolves has wider applications for other threatened animals, like the critically endangered red wolf. First, we need a little help from some recently discovered hybrid animals.
Red wolf “ghost alleles” in hybrid coyotes
Red wolves are in serious trouble. There are only about 20 in existence, and all descended from 12 lineages or founders. Even if the population were rebuilt through captive breeding programs and other protections, they would likely suffer from loss of genetic diversity. It turns out, however, that there are lost parts of the red wolf genome still alive in the world, they just don’t exist inside the red wolf population.
In Texas and Louisiana, red wolves have been quietly interbreeding with coyotes for some time. While the red wolf population has been shrinking, some of its genetic diversity has been slinking away into coyote-red wolf hybrids, according to a study published in Science Advances.
“In some animals we see very little red wolf ancestry, like 2%. More recently, we’ve come across some animals with as much as 70% of their genome coming from the red wolf. We’re looking at lots of different animals and trying to get a sense of if there are geographic hot spots with really high red wolf ancestry,” Bridget vonHoldt told SYFY WIRE back in 2022.
The hope was that scientists could find lost red wolf ancestry, so-called “ghost alleles” in the hybrid population, recovering genetic information they could use to restore health and diversity to the red wolves. A few years later, and in the shadow of the dire wolf news, some of those ghost alleles were returned to the red wolf population.
Preventing the extinction of the endangered red wolf
Once upon a time there were thousands of red wolves roaming North America, but they were hunted mercilessly, and by 1970 they were on the brink of extinction. Three years later, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service initiated an ambitious conservation effort.
The remaining wild wolves were captured and brought into a captive breeding program. Starting with just 14 animals, the population slowly began to climb and was eventually reintroduced to the wild. A total of 63 wolves were released between 1987 and 1994 and the wild population climbed to about 120 individuals. Then the conservation program ended, and the population crashed. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife red wolf conservation program started up again in 2021, but there are only 17 red wolves left in the wild.
Using the same blood cloning techniques used in the creation of the Colossal dire wolves, and building on the work of vonHoldt and colleagues, Colossal created four new red wolves: a female named Hope, and three males named Blaze, Ash, and Cinder.
The red wolf population increased by four individuals but, more importantly, it also increased in genetic diversity. In the creation of the red wolves, Colossal used genetic information gathered from southwest Louisiana hybrid ghost wolf population. Increasing genetic diversity is at least as important as increasing total population numbers, and these new red wolves represent three new lineages, taking the total from 12 to 15, a 25% increase.
The potential impact ranges even further than just wolves; blood cloning could be used to preserve and even restore genetic diversity from a wide range of animals. While de-extinction has the blockbuster bona fides, preventing extinction is preferable. An ounce of red wolf prevention is worth a pound of dire wolf cure.
Want more de-extinction, check out all of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films, now available from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, and start getting hyped for Jurassic World Rebirth, in theaters everywhere July 2.
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