cloning at Rantau Abang

The following write up is found in The Economist

Malaysian conservation : Dolly goes swimming

Jul 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

The fisheries department considers cloning leatherback turtles

FIFTY years ago Malaysia’s northern state of Terengganu played host to 6,000 to 10,000 leatherback turtle nests every summer. In 1984 there were 800. Last year Kamarruddin Ibrahim, head of the government’s turtle centre in Rantau Abang, counted just five. The population has plummeted because local people adore eating leatherback eggs and because fishermen are estimated to pull nearly a quarter of the species’ Pacific population from the ocean each year.

Which is why scientists, greens and officials gathered in Kijal, in southern Terengganu, this week to discuss what to do and how to pay for it. Many experts consider Malaysia’s leatherbacks as good as gone. The country introduced—and largely enforced—a ban on egg collection in the 1980s but the population nonetheless crashed in the mid-1990s.

Junaidi Che Ayub, head of the fisheries department, has another idea: cloning. As a strategy to save the animal, this is a bad idea. The project is rumoured to cost $9m and may not work. The plan is to develop expertise by trying cloning techniques first on smaller, less endangered, green turtles. Although a few wildlife-loving geneticists have cloned three threatened mammals—an African wildcat, an Asian banteng and a cattle-like creature called a gaur—scientists have yet to manage a reptile (although some reptiles can clone themselves).

Even if it worked, only four out of ten leatherback eggs develop properly. Tony Steyermark, of the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, calculates that 1,000-odd successful clones would be needed for a fair shot at creating a breeding female, such are the odds of leatherback hatchlings snuffing it. Moreover, cloning fails to shuffle genes, which is the point of sex. Thus a pack of 350kg floating copies stands a worse chance of surviving a new disease than do a handful of genetically different individuals. Mr Junaidi might do better to bully fishermen and buy incubators.