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May 18, 2005

Interspecies Surrogacy - From Feral Children to Tigers Suckled By Dogs

How much of who we are and what we become is due to our genes and how much is due to how we are raised? This is the essence of the nature/nuture debate.

It's interesting how far we've come with various forms of the nuture - both before and after birth.

Surrogates within a Species

Whether it's wetnurses for aristocrats or polar bears adopting orphans of their own species after losing their own, there are many cases when animals have taken care of their own, even if they were not related. The more advanced civilization becomes, the less the coupling between blood relatives seems to become. Sometimes it's within a species, but not a breeding pair, for example the two male vultures who have successfully raised several chicks at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, ironically. Read more about the Gay Birds Of A Feather Parent Together At Israeli Zoo at CNN.com.

Surrogates with other Species - Accidental

Then we have the cases where, for some reason, an animal has come to care, feed and raise an animal of another species. I'm not talking about pets here in the traditional sense - I'm talking about becoming the parent of a creature. There are many fewer examples of humans becoming parental figures for animals, and it generally results from imprinting. However, this can go both ways, can't it?

This got me wondering about children raised by wolves. Did they really exist? I guess the answer is yes - feral children do exist. They're not a hoax. One site I came upon was for feral children documented throughout history. They catalog children raised by animals, children who've lived on their own, and children who have been forcefully confined and not allowed to interact socially. They've got accounts of children raised by dogs, chimps, monkeys, goats, leopards, wolves, apes, bears, gazelles, cows and even ostriches. Some may be far-fetched, but clearly animals can occassionally show compassion for human babies. For example, just this month, CNN reported on a stray dog cared for an abandoned baby in Kenya.

Surrogates with other Species - Deliberate

Scientists have only recently realized that using surrogates can sometimes help species under threat. Some examples include:

• Dogs Nursing Tiger Cubs in China
• Jersey Cows as Surrogates for African Water Buffalo to avoid Bovine TB
• Using Chickens to Hatch Waterfowl Eggs

And some have inanimate objects as pseudo-surrogates, including stuffed animals. This method has worked well for Orphaned Humboldt Penguins and Baby Callimicos.

And then some more farfetched scenarious - Humans may already play surrogate parent roles after birth, but now some are considering Human surrogate mothers for great apes, too.

Surrogates with In Vitro and Embryotic Transfer

Surrogacy extends further now that scientists have found that they can sometimes use common animals to carry the embryos of less common animals, birth them, and sometimes even raise them. The success of these procedures often relies on the fact that the surrogate species be closely related to the species being bred. For example, endangered African Wildcats were born from house cats surrogate mothers only recently. This is only one of many such endeavors.

Surrogates with Cloning

Of course, recently, there's been cloning - with the saving of various endangered and extinct species being a prominent point in the ethics debate. Cattle-like Asian gaur have been cloned, carried and raised by your common cow, and now a prominent cloning company is attempting to clone endangered pandas, using black bear females as surrogates. This may even go a step further, with the concept of "Frozen zoos" or genetic sample banks for the animal species of the world. This has immense repercussions when you consider not only the animals under threat, but those that are already extinct.

Jurassic Park, here we come? Already, Asian scientists are planning to clone some wooly mammoth and set up a prehistoric Pleistocene park. We've got some juicy T.Rex flesh... are they next?

Posted by sorsha at May 18, 2005 11:08 PM