A Cloned Ferret Successfully Birthed Two Healthy Offspring

The future is now

Hiya!

Things like flying cars, interplanetary travel, and cloning are prime examples of futuristic technology. Yet, modern scientists are currently making significant strides with each. The FAA signed off on the first flying car in 2023, Elon Musk is determined to send humans to Mars with SpaceX, and scientists have already cloned several animals.

Still, while each advancement is in the works, it’ll be a while before any of them become common or widespread. Yet, while we go about our lives, the timelines creep forward as scientists advance their research bit by bit, reaching and surpassing new milestones. Like recently, experts entered a new realm of cloning science when a cloned black-footed ferret successfully gave birth to healthy offspring.

Black-Footed Ferrets

Over twenty animals have already been cloned, ranging from fruit flies and rats to pigs and water buffalo. Not to mention, over 1,500 dogs, encompassing about 20 percent of the American Kennel Club’s recognized breeds, have also been cloned. However, another cloned animal has been making headlines recently: a black-footed ferret named Antonia. But before we discuss her story, let’s talk a bit about why Antonia exists at all.

Black-footed ferrets are adorable, carnivorous relatives of weasels with dark patches of fur around their eyes, paws, and the tips of their tails. Unfortunately, they’re one of the most endangered mammals in North America due to declining populations of their primary prey, the prairie dogs, diseases spreading through their populations, and us humans continuously destroying their habitats.

Black-footed ferret - Image Source: Wikicommons

In the late 1800s, an estimated one million black-footed ferrets thrived in North America, yet the species was considered extinct by the late 1950s. At least until 1964, when a sighting of a wild population restored scientists' hope for saving the species, but a captive breeding effort failed, and the group ultimately died out.

Thankfully, scientists got another chance to save the black-footed ferrets in 1981 when yet another wild population was discovered. This time, experts used a combination of traditional breeding programs and modern technological approaches like artificial insemination and cloning to keep the animals alive.

By May 2021, an incredible 1,029 black-footed ferrets had been born at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. Between 150 and 220 ferrets are reintroduced to the wild every year via one of thirty sites across Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Kansas, New Mexico, Canada, and Mexico.

Those seem like promising numbers and a successful conservation achievement, and it is, but there’s another major obstacle to encouraging a healthy black-footed ferret population rebound — genetic diversity.

Scientists can artificially inseminate and design all the breeding programs they want to boost black-footed ferret populations, but they won’t be very successful without genetic diversity. Without it leads to inbreeding, which can result in hereditary abnormalities, infertility, higher mortality rates, and a weaker immune system.

In April 2024, Megan Owen, the Vice President of conservation science at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, one of the partners in the cloning effort I’ll tell you about next, told Dino Grandoni of the Washington Post:

“Genetic diversity is critical for resilience to environmental change. It’s basically the raw material of adaptive evolution.”

The problem was that the entire population of living black-footed ferrets came from only seven individuals, which is the recipe for a genetic bottleneck that threatens the species' longevity by making them more susceptible to disease and reducing their ability to adapt to changing environments.

Enter Cloning