Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first de-extinction company, continues to make breakthroughs toward the return of long-lost species like the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, and dodo. As the enterprise inches closer to the return of these extinct icons and drives advancements in crucial conservation technologies, it has formed a nonprofit organization, the Colossal Foundation, to impactfully disseminate these technologies.
A Texas-based 501(c)(3), the Colossal Foundation will focus on leveraging the extinction company’s technological innovations to support global partner-led conservation initiatives with $50 million in initial funding. The foundation is launching with three core programmatic focuses: saving today’s at-risk species, research and development for conservation, and ensuring tomorrow’s biodiversity. Each of these programs is grounded in protecting valued endangered species and emphasizes the growing importance of collaboration and innovation within the conservation movement.
“We started the Colossal Foundation to ensure that we are delivering our technology solutions into the hands of those who can benefit the most,” Ben Lamm, Colossal CEO and co-founder, said in a press release. “The Colossal Foundation further expands our capacity to get our technologies into the world as fast as possible and brings new, much-needed funding to conservation while empowering the modernization of the tools. We envision a future where conservation efforts are proactive, innovative, and impactful because of the application of these emerging technologies.”
Saving Today’s At-Risk Species
With the U.N. reporting that over 1 million plant and animal species around the world are threatened with extinction, novel conservation strategies like genetic rescue are becoming increasingly valuable in providing species with a fighting chance. Defined by the use of assisted reproductive and gene-editing technology to increase a population’s genetic diversity — and therefore its resistance to extinction — genetic rescue is a fundamental tenet of Colossal Biosciences’ work, driving its collaborative efforts to protect beloved species like the northern white rhino and pink pigeon.
In addition to advancing the company’s collaborative projects and developing a tool kit to streamline the genetic rescue process for conservationists, the Colossal Foundation has unveiled several new projects as part of this program. One of these is saving the vaquita, a relative of the dolphin considered the most endangered marine mammal in the world, with fewer than 10 individuals remaining.
Native to the Gulf of California in Baja California, Mexico, the vaquita has plummeted in population since the late 1990s due to an unfortunate circumstance. Living in close association with the totoaba — a fish only found in the Gulf of California that’s highly sought after, given its swim bladder’s importance to Chinese medicine — the vaquita has been the victim of illegal bycatching, being caught and killed in the gill nets used to catch totoaba.
While the use of gill nets in vaquita habitats was permanently banned by Mexico in 2016, the species still needs support for its population to have any hope of rebounding. In partnership with the Vaquita Monitoring Group and the Mexican government’s La Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, the Colossal Foundation has announced efforts to stabilize the vaquita population.
The foundation will start by deploying state-of-the-art technology like underwater acoustic sensors and drones to monitor individuals and their habitat, providing ecological insights into their behaviors and threats. By closely monitoring the remaining vaquitas, the partnership aims to identify and mitigate threats to their survival, such as illegal fishing practices and habitat degradation, and open the door to biobanking and future genetic rescue efforts.
“In order to ensure that we can ever recover a population in free fall like this, we need to take a snapshot of the vaquita’s genetic diversity as it stands today, so that if or when the population is in recovery, there are genetic resources available that can help reintroduce the diversity that may have been lost between the time the population was biobanked and the time at which the population began to recover,” Lamm told IFLScience.
“By biobanking the vaquita population today we are giving humanity the tools necessary to revive the species should they go extinct. If vaquita go extinct, and if the forces of extinction, such as illegal fishing, are addressed, then there would be the resources available to restore the species from extinction and one day reintroduce the restored population to the northern Cortez.”
R&D For Conservation
In continuation of Colossal Biosciences’ innovative development of conservation technologies like artificial intelligence and drone-based monitoring, the Colossal Foundation will pave the way for computational, data-driven approaches to conservation by funding field projects that leverage these technologies.
In support of Colossal Biosciences’ efforts to save elephants, the Colossal Foundation will continue its collaborations with Save the Elephants and the Elephant Havens Wildlife Foundation to advance elephant monitoring. At the Elephant Havens wildlife refuge in Botswana, the foundation is using AI to facilitate the reintroduction of orphaned elephants to the wild.
By analyzing herd dynamics and behavioral differences between wild and orphan elephants with AI, Colossal and Elephant Havens are developing a robust understanding of the species’ unique social hierarchies and decision-making patterns that impact orphan rewilding.
“This partnership not only provides an opportunity to establish a better paradigm for reintroducing elephant herds but will allow us to build a detailed understanding of elephant calf physical and social development,” said Matt James, the executive director of the Colossal Foundation and chief animal officer at Colossal.
In partnership with the Samoa Conservation Society, BirdLife International, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Committee Pigeon and Dove Specialist Group, the foundation also plans to develop an AI-powered bioacoustic technology in hopes of identifying the lost tooth-billed pigeon. Using an algorithm to analyze audio-captured bird calls from the forests of Samoa, the foundation is trying to locate any remaining tooth-billed pigeons to restore the population.
Last seen in 2013, the tooth-billed pigeon is a large pigeon endemic to Samoa and one of the closest living relatives to the dodo. It makes a distinct “oooo”-sounding call, and the foundation believes that an algorithm combined with background noise filtering advanced signal processing techniques may be the answer to the species’ rediscovery.
Ensuring Tomorrow’s Biodiversity
With the unpredictability of future events, saving our species requires more than a focus on today. To ensure the safety of tomorrow’s biodiversity, the Colossal Foundation is dedicated to creating the world’s largest distributed biobank, a repository of genetic information that can be considered a safety net for the world’s endangered species.
Starting with animals it refers to as the Colossal 100 — some of the world’s most endangered and important vertebrate species as determined by leading authorities like the IUCN — the foundation will preserve a record of DNA, tissues, reproductive cells, and reference genomes to safeguard the species with uncertain futures.
“That digital sequencing information is really powerful to not just us but to conservationists globally. And these biobanks would be spread out all over the world, keeping preserved tissues in the places they come from, rather than hoarding them all in one place,” James explained to Syfy Wire.
Colossal Collaboration
As we brace for what scientists are referring to as the “sixth mass extinction,” it’s increasingly clear that traditional approaches to conservation aren’t enough, and novel strategies like technology-based collaboration are the key to long-lasting impacts.
As James concisely articulated, “The short story is that conservation needs powerful and committed allies. “We are here to be that ally. There is no more time to wait to protect the species we have on Earth today if we want to make sure they are still here in 10, 50, and 500 years.”
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