Doing the impossible to save endangered species

In the race against time to save threatened species, fighting in different ways, protected areas are created to conserve species in their natural habitat, awareness programs are carried out that teach populations to coexist with species while we expand more and more within of their territories and We try to control invasive species that can alter the balance of an ecosystem, endangering threatened native species.

But there is another way in which researchers seek to conserve species on the brink of extinction, in reality it is more like an emergency plan for species that are almost gone, it is about in vitro fertilization, that is, collecting eggs and sperm from endangered species. , to freeze them and be able to use them when you want to produce more individuals of that species and prevent them from becoming extinct.

This was a thylacine, more specifically the last thylacine, in 1933 when this recently restored and colored film was filmed, no one knew that she was the last thylacine, the last individual of the species is called Endlong or terminar in Spanish, the last thylacine seen in the wild was shot by a farmer three years earlier when he found it near his chicken coops, despite the fact that the thylacine was already struggling to survive since British settlers arrived with their dogs, foxes and farm animals who would occupy the territories they the thylacine inhabited since 1901 there was a local movement to try to save the species, but unfortunately they did not have the tools that we have now to do it.

In vitro fertilization could help us prevent species from becoming extinct as happened with the thylacine but it is not that easy, to begin with you need eggs and sperm from an animal that is already difficult to find because it is very scarce and collecting them can be stressful for them, especially in the case of eggs that can only be collected in an invasive way, then you have to freeze them to store them and many times that part of the process destroys the collected material.

So you have to make sure that the few eggs and sperm collected are very well used both to improve cryogenic preservation techniques, that is, freezing and thawing them without damaging the material, and fertilization processes to increase the success rate, tests are needed, but we cannot use the rare and valuable eggs and sperm of endangered species for testing.

And this is where cows and dolphins come in, cows are abundant because they are animals that we raise and exploit in industrial quantities, collecting their eggs is not difficult and dolphin sperm; And surprisingly, cows and dolphins, which look very different, are close enough relatives to have a great success rate with IVF.

A cow's egg and dolphin sperm were taken and boom, it is fertilized, for obvious reasons the embryos are destroyed after fertilization, a cow-dolphin hybrid, va-fin is an animal that should not exist, but thanks to the With an abundance of these “ingredients”, researchers can improve their cryogenic preservation and fertilization techniques so that when necessary they can produce viable embryos from endangered animals and thus save a species.

I don't know what you think, but it doesn't seem like you're playing god.

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