As long as the people working on this stay on top of it, I can't see how they wouldn't be able to make it work with only 100. Then again, if that is a problem, they could also do cross-breeding with other species, and then re-breed those with blue macaws as well, which admittedly won't prevent extinction entirely, but it might help keep something close to the species in existence.
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· 5 years ago
This is actually kind of what happened with wild bison in North America. They went extinct in the wild but still existed in captivity, so they bred the bison with regular cows. The offspring still looks like a normal bison and behaves like a normal bison, and those were the animals released back into the wild.
Fascinating - Didn't realize they'd done that with bison, although it makes perfect sense. Admittedly not an ideal solution, but since the chances of us not fucking up species to the point of extinction in the future is pretty much non-existent, it seems like a viable way to keep the core of the species alive. Most likely some of them have bred with other birds at some point in the history of their species. They may not even have to do it a lot, just enough to add some genetic diversity until the macaws can get back on their feet again.
Not that this makes their situation less sad at all, but at least there are options
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· 5 years ago
It’s something I’ve heard of scientists doing with populations that have suffered a significant bottleneck like that regarding genetic diversity, just to introduce some back into it. And hey, if it works, it works!
It's more "when will humans learn to stop ruining the environment and destroying the habitat of animals and learn to stop capturing all the exotic animals because pretty"
Not that this makes their situation less sad at all, but at least there are options