Banking species before it’s too late

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/08/2024 (631 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened. It was, at that time, an insurance policy for a cataclysm.

Located in northern Norway, the vault was built to store as many as 4.5 million different seed samples from around the world, seeds that would be needed to rebuild biodiverse crops, should individual species — or whole swathes of species — be wiped out.

Priority is given to food crops. The seeds, in packets of 500, are stored at -18 degrees C, and at the moment, seeds from 1.3 million different plants are kept in the facility.

It is both like a premise for a dystopian science fiction novel, and a bluntly pragmatic response to our clearly changing world.

Instead of shrugging our shoulders and accepting the potential loss of unique plant species, the idea goes, we can at least store their seeds and have the chance to bring them back.

Switch gears from -18 C to the idea of ocean temperatures cresting 38 C.

That’s the high temperature that was reached last year in waters off Florida, a temperature that lead to a massive die-off of natural corals. Coral researcher Carly Kenkel said that, with that peak temperature, she and her research team found corals in trouble throughout her research sites in the Florida Keys. By November of last year, she said 98 per cent of the corals in her field sites were dead.

Kenkel argued in the New York Times this week that we should now be looking at putting coral eggs and sperm in cryostorage to allow for in-vitro fertilization

“The goal is to buy time while we wait for the world to slow, and hopefully, one day reverse climate change. Banking and freezing coral may sound extreme, but it’s necessary — many of the remaining wild corals represent unique genetic combinations,” Kenkel wrote.

We’re building an ark. A frozen one.

Literally: there is another project — actually named the Frozen Ark Project — that started as researchers tried to protect the genetic material of a group of rare Tahitian snails.

The project now has DNA, tissue, sperm and eggs from over 700 species at a lab in Nottingham, England, while affiliates from a host of other nations maintain their own banks of animal material — focusing primarily on animals that are officially extinct in the wild. The Frozen Ark Project maintains a database of the worldwide effort to maintain deep-frozen animal samples.

Nature is a wonder.

It can, through evolution, develop 900 specific varieties of fig that each require a specific species of wasp to fertilize their flowers: to quote the Encyclopedia Britannica, the wasp family Agaonidae includes “any of about 900 species of tiny wasps responsible for pollinating the world’s 900 species of figs. Each species of wasp pollinates only one species of fig, and each fig species has its own wasp species to pollinate it.”

We’ll spare you the complex machinations about how the symbiotic reproductive relationship works to generate new generations of figs and wasps — you can easily look it up — but suffice to say, it’s nowhere near as simple a process as a drunken one-night stand in a motel behind a highway roadhouse.

Yet, none of that complexity matters for the survival of any of the world’s near-infinite variety of specialized and intertwined species. Whether they are in hot water or deadly drought, the tools that worked for their past survival won’t work now.

How odd it is that we can be responsible for the mechanics of the ever-increasing extinction of species, while casting ourselves in the role of their saviours.

Running our very own frozen zoo, caged in deep-frozen samples because a whole world can’t host them anymore.