They’re cute, they’re messy — and they could help bring your entire species back from the brink of extinction.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday announced the births last year of Noreen and Antonia, two baby ferrets cloned from cells frozen nearly four decades ago.
The successful cloning of these adorable predators is a milestone in the effort to save the black-footed ferret, one of North America’s most endangered mammals. Once considered extinct, the current population of wild ferrets is descended from just seven individuals, representing a serious lack of genetic diversity that threatens the long-term survival of the species.
Now, with these two new black-masked balls of fluff added to the mix, conservationists hope to begin breeding the two females later this year to inject some new blood into the population.
“Genetic diversity is critical for resilience to environmental change,” said Megan Owen, vice president of conservation science at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, one of Fish and Wildlife’s partners in the cloning effort. “It’s basically the raw material for adaptive evolution.”
With hundreds of thousands of plants and animals at risk of extinction, scientists and policymakers are increasingly turning to extraordinary technological means to rescue sea stars, songbirds and other species from the brink of oblivion.
As many as a million black-footed ferrets once roamed the mountain basins and grasslands of a dozen states before agriculture, diseases such as plague and the eradication of their prey, the prairie dog, caused their numbers to plummet. In 1979, what was believed to be the last black-footed ferret died in captivity.
Or so people thought. In 1981, a Wyoming cattle rancher encountered a small group of black-footed ferrets. Taken into captivity, biologists began breeding them again, but only had a handful of individuals to work with.
“Conservationists have worked hard to bring them back,” said Ben Novak, chief scientist at the biotechnology nonprofit Revive & Restore, which also partnered with Fish and Wildlife on the cloning project. “They are doing a very good job. But because of the historical bottleneck in the 1980s for black-footed ferrets, they simply have an extremely limited gene pool.”
One of the female ferrets, named Willa, left no living offspring. So, in 1988, scientists collected some of her cells and froze them at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, where the genetic material of about 1,200 species is kept on ice in its “Frozen Zoo.”
Willa’s first clone was born in 2020. Initially, that weasel, named Elizabeth Ann, appeared healthy. But she was never interested in the suitors who were presented to her. “She didn’t like the males and didn’t even let them in the tunnel,” Novak said. “She bit one of them on the nose.”
When her caregivers tried to artificially inseminate her, there was another problem: part of her uterus was filled with fluid, requiring a hysterectomy. Elizabeth Ann is still alive and strong, but cannot give birth. Agency officials do not believe his health problems are linked to cloning, as the disease can also occur in naturally born ferrets.
Now Noreen and Antonia, both born last May, represent a second attempt to revive Willa’s genetically distinct lineage. The cloned animals were made by injecting one of Willa’s cells into an egg from a domesticated ferret.
Noreen was born at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado, while Antonia lives across the country at the Smithsonian’s National Conservation Biology and Zoo Institute in Virginia.
Although authorities don’t plan to release the clones into the wild anytime soon, conservationists have reintroduced other black-footed ferrets to the Great Plains. But to sustain these populations, wildlife managers regularly apply insecticides to kill plague-carrying fleas and take other measures to control the deadly disease.
At the moment, Noreen and Antonia are feisty and seem healthy. As the couple approaches their first anniversary in May, officials hope to begin breeding them later this year.
Owen hasn’t met any of them yet. “I haven’t seen these two, but I can’t wait because they are so incredibly cute.”
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They are young and athletic. They are also sick with a disease called POTS.
