Pleistocene rewilding

Something that often crops up when lamenting the lost megafauna is Pleistocene rewilding, where the ecosystems of that era are re-created by reintroducting the lost species (if they still exist elsewhere e.g. grey wolves) or substituting with a close genetic relative if the species is extinct (e.g., African elephants in the place of mammoths and mastodonts).

The ethics and science of this can be tricky. Taking wild animals from Africa or Asia and moving them to areas like Europe or North American has been called a kind of 'biopiracy' (Levy, 2011). Taking animals from captivity and releasing them into such areas is less ethically troubling, and could contribute to a transition from 'zoos' to 'zoo reserves' in unprotected habitats via zoo coalitions as suggested by (Conway, 2003).

The impacts of introducing close matches rather than the real deal is, however, understudied and thus their hypothetical effect on ecosystem remains largely unknown (Levy, 2011). Reintroducing regionally extinct species however is much more popular and well studied (for example, see my post about wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone, US below).

Video from a post in The Scientist. See the post by Daniel Cossins here.

Note: In this video, they mention Aurochs, which are technically extinct (Levy, 2011). However, this may be a case of a close genetic substitution. For example, the aesthetically similar Heck cattle have been used as Auroch stand-ins at Oostvaaderplassen (a European reserve). The 'wild' horses too, are not the same species as those that lived during the Pleistocene, but species such as Konik horses fill similar ecological roles (Levy, 2011).