Extinction Essay

The End of Extinction?

Scientists are close to cloning an Australian frog that no longer exists.

S cientists around the world are at work to resurrect extinct animals such as the Australian gastric brooding frog.

Australian researches have made major steps towards bringing frog that was extinct in 1983 back to life. Although the procedure of de-extinction is much more complex than cloning living animals. A group of scientists (Lazarus Project team) believe humans have the skill and obligation to repair the damage they have done to the world, which has caused numerous species to die out.

Gastric Brooding Frog

The gastric brooding frog, Rheobatrachus silus swallowed its eggs, kept its young in its stomach and gave birth through its mouth (figure 1). Unfortunately this frog became extinct in 1983.

Many scientists were fascinated by the creatures that seemed to disappear from the forests of Queensland every year and during this time were thought to be hibernating. Although before they had a chance to study them in further detail the frogs became extinct.

The Lazarus Project team were able to recover cell nuclei from tissues gathered in the 1970s that were kept for 40 years in a conventional deep freezer. After repeating experiments for 5 years researches used a technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer. To complete this, scientists used fresh donor eggs from a distantly related Great Barred Frog. The egg

Figure 1- This is a gastric-brooding frog giving birth in the University of Adelaide.

Source :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130315151044.htm

nuclei was then inactivated and substituted with dead nuclei from the extinct frog. Some eggs started to grow and divide to early embryo stage (a tiny ball of m...

... middle of paper ...

...a faster rate than ever. Data from graphs evidently prove this theory. From the graph the greatest leap of extinction is seen 1920s till now. This trend line is drastically increasing (figure 4). Experts say that approximately half of the world’s current species will be entirely gone by the end of the century, hence proving that we are in the middle of an anthropogenic mass extinction.

Critics claim that species vanish and new ones appear all the time. That’s true, if you’re talking in terms of millennia. Species disappear at an approximate rate of one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost ones at about the same rate. Although lately humans caused the extinction rate to severely increase, to where entire species are annihilated each day. Nature will take millions of years to repair what is destroyed in just a few decades.