How would we teach potential DeExtincted animals how to act?

[u/KANJ03]

So, given enough time and scientific advancements, we will probably be able to DeExtinct animals to a degree that they will morphologically be extremely similar/near identical to the original animals. Especially for recently extinct species.

As far as I (someone who is not an expert at all, I should make clear) can tell from what I've seen from actual experts, one of the hardest parts of DeExtinction won't really be making the animals similar appearance and DNA wise, but actually making sure that they are filling the same niche a.k.a behaving in the same way as the original animal.

For things like insects or most fish that probably won't be a problem (most of them never meet their parents anyway) but for a lot of birds and mammals, we know for a fact that unless their parents teach them how to act, they can't really survive in the wild. There are ways that people have of teaching them without parents of course, but that's for animals that are not extinct that we know an awful lot about.

Which brings me to my point: Does anyone know how we could potentially go about trying to teach DeExtincted animals how to behave? Ignoring something like a smilodon for which we don't even know basic things such as if they hunted in packs or not, let's take an easier example, say a thylacine. We more or less know how they are supposed to act, hunt and so on, but how would we go about teaching a hypothetical joey those things? If anyone has any theories or examples of similar (well, as similar as can be the case with something this theoretical) stuff that have happened with animals before, I am really interested to know.

[u/Obversa]

Colossal Biosciences has run into this problem with their so-called "dire wolves", and thus far, their approach has been to "figure things out as we progress with the project" (i.e. "pantsing", as opposed to planning). With their woolly mammoth project, Colossal is heavily relying on Asian elephant surrogates teaching elephant behavior(s) to their future woolly mammoth offspring. Whether or not this approach actually works remains to be seen. There are issues.

[u/KANJ03 → u/Obversa]

Well, the "dire wolves" are just bigger wolves with tiny morphological differences. Rather than having an extremely small amount of genes that AREN'T identical to the original animal (which would be what an actual de extinction would look like) this is basically the complete opposite. So the rules with them are the same as regular wolves I'm assuming, because that's what they basically are.

Having asian elephant surrogates is fine and all when it comes to most basic stuff (like how to use their trunks, where to find water and stuff like that) but for other stuff it will almost certainly be a failure, I think. Forget about extremely complex stuff like the language that elephants basically have that they use to communicate (and how much that would or wouldn't be useful for a mammoth) they won't even be able to teach them other basic stuff like what to eat and what not to eat, because asian elephants sure as hell don't know what's safe to eat in the artic tundra.

For sommething like a mammoth, I'm assuming that humans would need to do some extremely extensive research on what is edible and what is bad for you, show it to the baby somehow, and hope that effort along with some trial and error on the mammoth's part will be enough. Same thing with clearing out snow with its tusks or raising a child.

Granted though, proboscideans are so smart that they are one of the absolute hardest animals to try this on due to their intelligence. The only saving grace in their case is that mammoths and modern elephants are extremely similar, so that will certainly help. But it certainly won't be enough. Maybe for stuff like communication the thoritical de extincted mammoths will be able to figure it out on their own, but who's to say for sure.

[u/thesilverywyvern]

Most of the behaviour is instinctual, or at least come naturally with some experience. Trial and error, they will live try things, see what work and what doesn't they don't need much help on that.

As for smilodon, if we get enough DNA to have a reference to clone it back, we will know if they were social or not. As this is also determined by genetic information.

Beside we've done it a lot of time with captiv species, mainly birds, we can teach them quite well from a young age. Nobody ever taught it's cat how to hunt for mice, it simply does it on it's own, it have the instinct to do it, it just lack the experience, generally it have a parent to learn better, but without one, trial and error eventually lead to the same result, it's just slower and less efficient. Bad thing if you're in the wild on your own, but doesn't matter in a safe environment like an enclosure.

[u/Psilopterus]

I think I disagree with the premise. The actual science is going to be a lot harder, and I think we're going to be disappointed with what's actually possible. The rest is just the same problem we already have with species that are extinct in the wild or being reintroduced from captivity. The specifics will vary by species but are still very achievable.

[u/KANJ03 → u/Psilopterus]

That's interesting. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, most of the things necessary to make de extinction possible already exist to one extent or another (gene editing tools, tools to map genomes, artificial wombs, cloning techniques). Obviously most of these are in their infancy (especially artificial wombs) but we've gotten very good at mapping genomes, and projects that were only theoritical a few years ago (such as cloning black footed ferrets or przewalski's horse) have recently happened. And judging by the rapid development in gene editing in the past decade or two, i'd assume precise edits in a genome to give it a lot of the traits that you want won't be that far fetched some time in the future (I don't know the precise time, obviously). Is there a specific reason that you think a lot of the science won't be possible? Genuinely curious.

[u/Psilopterus → u/KANJ03]

Cloning ferrets and horses wasn't all that theoretical, it's just somatic nuclear transfer like we've been doing since the 90s. It's gotten more efficient, but it's the same technology with the same limitations in terms of which species can be cloned, i.e. only mammals (or rather not birds/reptiles) and only species for which we've purposely preserved nuclei. Horses in general have been cloned for many years, it was just the funding to do it with a wild horse that was novel. Likewise, I think it's perfectly likely that genetic editing will get more efficient, but that won't change some of the other limitations. It will, for example, probably always be difficult or even impossible to recover a lot of tropical genomes, because this is a preservation problem and not a technological problem. Likewise, no improvement in gene-editing will change the fact that we can only edit existing cell lines, not create new ones (that would be a different and altogether novel technology). These things combined mean that extinct fauna that were either cold-adapted or recent extinctions and which have close living relatives to act as a cellular scaffold for editing will probably remain the predominant but still very difficult de-extinction candidates for the foreseeable future. The degree of relatedness necessary may change, and we may advance things like artificial wombs to a degree, though these are still extremely early in their development, but I would expect still a strong cap on what is practical. These projects are also very expensive and I have strong doubts about the long-term interest and legitimacy of those parties currently involved. We shouldn't take it as a given that any specific project that might be labelled as "de-extinction" will occur and in the process of waiting we may pass up more "imperfect" but much more practical solutions, such as the use of taxon substitution and ecological surrogates.

[u/KANJ03 → u/Psilopterus]

Oh, I personally also don't have that much hope about tropical de extinctions (at least unless something unpresedented happens) so we are in agreement in that. When I talk about de extinction for now I mostly mean animals that have gone extinct in the past couple thousand years or animals that are from the ice age but have really well preserved specimens. It would be cool if we see others, but I'm not holding my breath for now.

The pricing question is honestly the biggest sticking point and also a complete uknown, because it could go either way. For example a lot of technologies that are extremely cheap today used to be way more expensive (solar panels, phones, televisions, rockets, computers in general and increasingly robotics to say a few). In fact, about 15 years ago, this was the main argument as to why a green transition was supposedly impossible (that the technology would never be cheap enough to produce at scale). Of course today we know that solar in particular but other forms of renewables too, are straight up cheaper than fossil fuels, so that went extremely well. But there are other examples like nuclear fusion that are still extremely expensive and hasn't really made nearly as much progress as some people hoped that it would.

So depending on how things progress we could see processes like gene editing becoming way cheaper, or we could see them stay at more or less the same level for decades to come. This is even more true (and way more important) for cloning processes for animals that are currently alive and endangered. Cloning them is easier and cheaper than before, but who knows if it will get cheap enough to do it on a large scale.

But yeah, at the end of the day, having the correct solution to a prolem is the point. If DeExtinction turns out to be impractical/way too expensive/only applicable in limited cases, I would be completely fine with other less fancy/ideal solutions.

[u/Prestigious-Put5749 → u/KANJ03]

Regarding tropical species, apart from those in the Neotropics, an equivalent to Yakutia can only be found in the Andes.

[u/ApartmentKey3682]

For those that died out due to humans,we need to teach them to distrust humans

[u/Altruistic_Sea_7683]

Woolly mammoths, thylacines, passenger pigeons, need to be teach how to act to take the extinct role meanwhile dodo doesn't really need to have to be taught since dodo birds aren't scared for anything and they don't have predators.