Honestly cloning has limited usefulness in conservation, let alone deextinctuon. If a population has bottlenecked or fallen below the carrying threshold then cloning what's left doesn't functionally help. Even cloning a recently deceased individual might not help, depending on a lot of factors. It's annoying that it's treated like this big help to conservation when frankly well managed breeding programs are a much bigger help than cloning will ever be.
Oh don't get me wrong
There's certainly room for thoughtful, ethical cloning use in conservation!
A really great example is in Black-footed ferrets just last year. They're critically endangered partially due to reduced fertility from inbreeding depression.
Two jills (female ferrets) were cloned from historic samples of a ferret called Willa, who was captured and never reproduced in her lifetime. Because of this, reintroducing her genes helped bolster the genetic diversity of the population!
This is one of the twin ferret sisters, Antonia.
Better yet, the above ferret then went on to give birth to healthy kits! They're super cute, and being 100% ferret made the old-fashioned way (not clones), shouldn't have any of the issues that clones sometimes do.
Behold them!
But what Colossal is doing is not cloning!
I can't stress that enough! It's genetic modification, but cloning means creating a complete replicate of another animal.
Even using genetic modification has many potential applications in conservation; coding endangered species with resistance to population-devastating diseases, or using it to recode lost genetic diversity, as a few examples. But the way Colossal is using it is not to preserve endangered species. They have created, depending on your opinion:
1) a GMO grey wolf (or wolfdog, given where the white-coat gene came from).
2) a completely new transgenic species.
They claim to be filling the niche left by an extinct species, but this is honestly BS. They haven't made an extinct species, nor an endangered one. It couldn't even fill the niche if that niche was still open.
"The T. rex in this Jurassic Park is just a frog..."
Given the curiosity about rabies, are there more than one variation to rabies?
Yes. There are other viruses in the genus Lyssavirus, and the rabies virus itself has different strains or variants. We generally characterize them based on their reservoir species (i.e. bat, raccoon, skunk, mongoose, fox, etc) and geographic location. iirc, some species have multiple strains, while others have only had one strain of rabies identified. It is not just those species that can be infected by that particular strain, but transmission mostly occurs between members of the same species.
Image source
If you find this sort of stuff interesting, the AVMA has a really neat article about rabies surveillance back from 2021.
Since deer are happy to monch baby birds IRL... are there taboos about that in the golden shrike world? What's their alternative for calcium and protein in a pinch?
My friends I've seen many people so interested in these aspects of the comic, but they're something I just vague away because I can. The characters are barely shown eating onscreen because it's irrelevant, but we all just know they're eating. And when they're eating we can just assume they get the stuff they need.
I get that being logical enough is super important to keep it all believeable, but as long as I don't have to explain it in detail I think I can get away with it. There's only so many things I can portray in a comic page.
As tiny answers to your big questions; bird eating is a no-no, and Iralee's halv munching habits are regarded as someone eating their pet cat or christian gnawing on a bible. But it comes from a place of faith so fellow deer are/try to be okay with it.
Stonekrovns are omni/carnivores and they can't just choose to eat plants. They're exiled away so they feed on small to medium prey and fill up with berries and shrub and twinkies and whatever they have on their mountain. They have slow metabolism so it's not like they're always starving, even though it's not easy out there.
I saw a golden version of Hazard the other day while driving (no pictures, sorry). So just know his funky (good) looks aren't alone. He's got a yellow cousin out in the Midwest.
I've seen a number of shar-pei mixes online and the vast majority of them are just. [other breed] + [SO MUCH SKIN]
