A biotech company claiming to have regained the tragic wolves from extinction has announced plans to revive a giant extinct bird called the MOA. However, experts say that the miserable wolves have never been a true revival, and the MOA will make it even more difficult to expand.
Earlier this month, Texas-based Colossal Biosciences said they have teamed up with filmmaker Sir Peter Jackson and Indigenous partners to regain the 12-foot (3.6 meters)-high South Island giant MOA (Dinornis robustus) and other MOA species. These flightless birds roamed New Zealand around 600 years ago until they were chased into extinction by early Maori settlers.
The new project will be coordinated by the Ngāi Tahu Research Center, a joint venture between the Maine Maori (IWI) on the South Island of New Zealand and the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. This is a multifaceted project aimed at combining traditional Māori knowledge, wildlife conservation and genetically engineering-driven derailment.
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However, the project has already fired. Critics have emphasized that some Māori IWIs are opposed to detoxification, but some scientists have argued that modifying genetically living animals cannot regain lost species. The scientific criticism is similar to the commentary after Colossal published its “The Dangerous Wolf.” This species was extincted over 10,000 years ago.
Colossal’s “Direwe Wolves” is a genetically modified grey wolf (Canis lupus) with 20 gene editing. The company claims they are miserable wolves (Aenocyon Dirus) due to several observable properties that can be seen in the Dire Wolf Genome, such as increased size and a white coat. However, genetically, they are still mostly grey wolves. The same applies to the MOA project for Colossal modifications of living animals, but it’s even more complicated in MOA.
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Moa’s closest living relatives are a group of South American birds called Tinamous. The largest Tinamou breed is smaller than most household chickens, making it extremely small compared to the giant MOAs on the South Island. The Australian EMU (Dromaius novaehollandiae) is the next closest relative, but these large, flightless birds resemble the giant MOAs physically, but they are not as big yet, growing to an average height of 5.7 feet (1.75 m). Both of these living relatives were separated from MoA long ago.
“More and Tinamou’s common ancestry lived 58 million years ago, while More and Emu’s common ancestry lived 65 million years ago,” Nic Rawlence, director of the Otago Paleogenesis Institute at the University of Otago in New Zealand and critic of the MOA Project, told Live Science. “That’s a lot of evolutionary time.”
To put it in context, the miserable wolves split only from modern wolves-like Canids, a group containing grey wolves, about 5.7 million years ago (or even more recently 4.5 million years ago) according to a recent Prelint, involving some of the Colossal scientists, that is, MOA had time to evolve their distinctive traits.
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Lawrence explained that MOA and their closest living relatives are descendants of a small group of flying birds called Litonids. These animals live all over the world and have produced various groups that have independently lost their ability to fly. As Lawrence puts it, these flightless birds were “filling the vacancies of ecosystem work left behind by the extinction of dinosaurs.”
MOAs and EMUs lose flight through a process called Convergent Evolution, and various organisms evolve similar traits. In other words, according to Lawrence, the physiological and developmental mechanisms behind body planning have evolved through potentially different genetic routes.
“The genetically engineered specific genes in EMUs that match the MOA can have developmental consequences given this independent, convergent evolutionary history,” Rawlence said.
Live Science asked Colossal if there are health risks associated with genetically engineered living animals. Colossal’s Chief Science Officer, Beth Shapiro, told Live Science the company has been accredited by the American Humane Society and that animal welfare is a priority in their work.
“We will thoroughly assess the health risks of proposed editors before selecting them for the final list of edits,” Shapiro said in an email.
Colossal’s MOA Detension Plan
Before Colossal begins creating modern MOAs, the company aims to sequence and reconstruct the genomes of all nine extinct MOA species, simultaneously sequence the high quality genomes of the closest living relatives. This allows Colossal to identify changes that have led to unique qualities in the MOA, such as body size and lack of wings.
Researchers then use primitive germ cells, a precursor to sperm or egg cells, to “build surrogate birds,” from live species to “build surrogate birds,” and create genetic changes to create birds with MOA properties. The company requires both male and female agents to carry the “MOA” sperm and eggs, and then produces genetically modified offspring.
The Colossal website states that the larger the size of the Emus, the more appropriate agent is than the Tinamous. However, details on this part of the process are limited. Shapiro told Live Science they were “in the process of selecting surrogate species for Moa de-eventinction.”
The emu laid a large green egg about 5 inches (12 cm) long and 3.5 inches (9 cm) wide. Still, it’s nothing compared to the giant MOA eggs on the South Island. This was 9.5 inches (24 cm) x 7 inches (17.8 cm).
“The huge MOA eggs on the South Island will not fit within the EMU agent, so Colossal needs to develop artificial proxy egg technology,” says Rawlence.
Colossal briefly mentioned artificial eggs during the MOA announcement but did not provide details regarding this part of the process. Live Science asked if Colossal could explain how Colossal hatched the South Island giant MOA.
“Our exogenous development team is exploring a variety of strategies for incubation of artificial eggs, which have applications for both MOA detoxification and bird maintenance tasks,” Shapiro said in an email.
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