Extinct Vomiting Frog to be Cloned

Congratulations to the proud mama.

I’m generally not one who likes tinkering with Mother Nature. Type “Frankenfish” into the search box on the sidebar and you’ll see plenty of evidence to support that. But perhaps there’s something infectious about Alaska’s spirit of adventure and possibility that makes me dream outside the box, because ever since I came here, I have had a secret mad scientist sort of fantasy. And now, I’m going to tell you what it is.

I want a mammoth. Not personally, but I want Alaska to have a mammoth, or a whole herd of them. I want Jurassic Park, only with vegetarians. I want our state fossil to become our state mascot.

A while ago, I even purchased a clump of mammoth hair that was excavated from a carcass entombed in the permafrost up by Nome, where the old land bridge used to connect this continent to Russia. If Sarah Palin had lived 12,000 years ago, she could have WALKED to Russia from her house. And it would have fallen to Pleistocene humans to decide what to do with her. I’m thinking ice floe.

I bought the clump of hair not so I could sit in my basement with a petrie dish trying to create a franken-mammoth, but just for the sake of having it. It’s amazing how much the soft undercoat feels like the wool of a musk-ox (known as Qiviut). These creatures must have gotten their outerwear from the same gene bank. And unlike cold, hard dinosaur bones, or fossilized impressions of fish in some ancient mud, this was the real thing. You could actually know what a mammoth felt like. You knew what color it was. You could see the guard hairs, all crinkly and thick, sticking out of that soft wool, and the actual sense of a living mammoth was literally within your grasp.

And think of the possibilities of combing mammoths, like they do with muskoxen, for their fur? I bet the mammoths have a better disposition, and think how many awesome scarves and hats you could get from a couple dozen of the big guys?

Since I’m playing true confessions, I’ve also toyed with fantasies about giving the endangered Siberian tiger an Alaskan sanctuary, and I’ve wondered what would happen if penguins were secretly transplanted here under cover of night, and if they could survive. It’s not like we don’t have room. But, one thing at a time. Extinction first.

So, it was with interest that I read the article entitled “Resurrecting the Extinct Frog with a Stomach for a Womb.” 

Simply put, the mother frog converts her stomachs into a womb. She swallows her own eggs and stops making hydrochloric acid in her stomach to avoid digesting her own young. Around 20 to 25 tadpoles hatch inside her and the mucus from their gills continues to keep the acid at bay. While the tadpoles grow over the next six weeks, mum never eats. Her stomach bloats so much that her lungs collapse, forcing her to breathe through her skin. Eventually, she gives birth to her brood through “propulsive vomiting”, spewing them into the world as fully-formed froglets.

It wasn’t because of the oddly Roman god-like giving of birth, but the fact that the article went on to describe how this species had gone extinct while scientists were studying it. And then they discovered another species of “gastric brooding frog,” and no sooner had they found that one, than it too went extinct. And now efforts are underway to bring the frog back from extinction, and they are meeting with some success. How about that?

Cloning technology, once it’s successful, could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective expiration date for DNA.

Ponder, if you will, the museum exhibits around the world that have various stuffed critters that no longer walk, swim, or fly the planet – mammoths, ivory billed woodpeckers, golden toads, carrier pigeons, Tasmanian tigers, and dodos just to get your imagination started. Then, speaking of Alaska, we’ve got the woolly rhinoceros, the mastodon, and the steppe bison. Heck, we’ve even got one of those right at the University of Fairbanks!

And we can’t forget the Steller’s sea cow, a species of manatee that used to populate the Aleutians until hungry humans ate them into oblivion.

Considering the fact that human hunting, and habitat destruction from our own greed and thoughtlessness played a part in many cases of extinction, it can be argued that as they stare at us with glass eyes from a museum diorama, we owe them some kind of karmic debt.

And yes, there’s always going to be a faction of party-poopers out there who talk about tinkering with Mother Nature, and all that, especially when it comes to species like the mammoth.

“Maybe it would be easier to get something like the frog across the finish line,” says Michael Archer who heads the team of scientists working on the frog project. “And then people who were so negative might take a deep breath and back off.”

Yeah. Back off negative people!

And march on, cloners in lab coats. Do your thing. Make amends to the weird vomiting frogs, and then get started on my Pleistocene Theme Park!

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