Can Cloning Help Endangered Species? | Wild Hope Explains

This is Antonia. She's an endangered black-footed ferret. There are only around 650 alive today, so every ferret counts. But Antonia is special, because she's also a clone. Cloning is one of the most cutting-edge tools in modern conservation. Antonia's genes represent fresh hope for her species. Because Antonia isn't just any clone. She's the clone of a ferret that died nearly 40 years ago. Back in 1981, black-footed ferrets were as endangered as they come, down to just one small wild population. Pressure from humans and introduced disease had brought them to the brink of extinction. So conservationists took the dramatic step of bringing them all into captivity. The move saved the species, but all ferrets born into the new breeding program were descended from just seven original founders. That created a serious genetic bottleneck. Continued inbreeding was the only option, because there were so few ferrets left, and that made matters worse. Over successive generations, the whole population became as closely related as first cousins or even siblings. Then, along came Dolly. Dolly was a little lamb who made a big splash back in 1996. She was the first mammal ever cloned from adult cells, using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Scientists replaced the nucleus of one sheep's egg cell with the nucleus of another sheep's body cell, then let the fused cell replicate and grow into an embryo. The embryo was then implanted into a surrogate mother who gave birth to Dolly. The black-footed ferret breeding team took notice, but not because they wanted to clone any existing ferrets, which were already too closely related. They wanted to boost the gene pool by reaching back in time. When the last wild population was captured, scientists had cryopreserved tissue from a ferret that had left no offspring. In 2013, the team decided to explore whether cloning could turn the frozen tissue sample into living, breathing ferrets. If successful, the clones would inject some much-needed variation back into the population. The key word was if. Cloning technology isn't a simple copy-paste. Each species needs its own clone-making recipe built around its specific reproductive cycle. Domesticated animals like sheep are easier because we have experience from breeding them for thousands of years. But back in 2013, endangered species had only been cloned a few times, each just a proof of concept, not a dedicated investment in the species' long-term recovery. Still, the ferret-captive breeding team decided it was time to give it a go. It took years of careful research and planning, but in 2020, Elizabeth Anne, the first-ever clone of a North American endangered species, was born. Because of her lineage, Elizabeth Anne had three times the genetic diversity She was followed in 2023 by Antonia and Noreen, two more clones from the same frozen cell line. Then, in June 2024, after mating with a non-cloned ferret, Antonia gave birth to two healthy kits of her own. This officially integrated new genes into the population for the first time since the 1980s. The kits provide a path to more robust and healthy black-footed ferrets in generations to come. They also prove that cloning can be a viable tool for helping endangered species. But it's most effective when there are reserves of frozen DNA to pull from. Luckily, while cryopreserving endangered animal cells was rare in the 1980s, it's becoming increasingly common today. Tens of thousands of samples from hundreds of different species are stored at nearly a dozen frozen zoos worldwide. Given its cost and complexity, cloning is unlikely to ever become the go-to solution for saving endangered species. Keeping them healthy in the wild is still the best strategy. But with the advances that have been made since Dolly, conservation cloning has become a potential lifeline for pulling critically endangered species back from the brink. Explore these stories and many more from Wild Hope by visiting wildhope.tv or watch the full collection now right here on PBS Nature on YouTube.