Biodiversity Preservation

            During the late twentieth century humanity was beginning to awaken to the damage it had inflicted on the environment, but with the tide of destruction seemingly unstoppable it came to the attention of conservationists that the only possible way of ensuring global biodiversity was to take samples from all the Earth’s species and carefully store them until better times came.

            Sampling varied drastically with the ages changing pace of biological samples, initially it was thought that taking gametes would be only successful method (which is difficult to harvest), and with later advances of cloning, people began to think that whole scale recreation of animals, and therefore easier collection of gametes was the way (clone the animal, and harvest it's gametes).

These two main ideas did not survive to when preservation was fully in it's stride, by which time advances in cell destination and reprogramming allowed simple tissue samples (easily obtained) to be transformed into primordial germ cells that could produce gametes on tap.

It was this last method that provided the breakthrough, it meant that ecologists just needed to gain living cells of their target creatures, and then back in the labs they could be made to proliferate into the valuable germ cells, and these along with their stem cell precursors were chilled and immersed into a cryogenic stasis, where they could thawed in better times.

Also the choices in species changed throughout this undertaking. This reflected the limited initial funding for such a project, where the possible benefits were not apparent. The first species that were conserved were those facing the dangers of extinction, not just threatened species, but those whose populations were in the hundreds and less, and even these choices were influenced more by how the public supported the species than its actual ecological importance.

Preservation of biodiversity was helped a little by the fact the process allowed researchers access to large numbers of wild species cells, these could scoured to find valuable gene products or useful pharmaceutical properties, at this point people began to realize that by cataloging the world around us we would also be able to search for novel products, this established the final incentive that launched preservation to attempt to find every species, and indirectly to their safety.

Preservation at first seemed as if it would struggle against the damage being wreaked against the environment, nearly always interceding just after a species had gone past some critical point, however, these first casualties were enough to increase the haste of the teams and cataloging went well beyond those threatened species, indeed it flourished even in the mid 2000’s when humanity was getting abreast of its vandalism and repairing the damage it had wrought. The era of preservation really ended here, however with fast and easy to use equipment, more species were being cataloged, and the real fever was to record, analyze and name all of the species on the Earth.

However preservation was only ever one side of the project, restoration was the other, by the time that this phase was dominant, cryogenic cell handling had been perfected to an art, however the grasp on cryogenics for whole animals was still beyond humanities grasp. The majority of the collection that preservation created were simple organisms bacteria and protists, most of these overcame the freezing with ease, and could be rapidly bred up and reintroduced (often in giant nutrient filled fermenters).

However the more complex Eukaryotes, the kingdoms of plants and animals were more difficult (fungi were relatively to generate as they grow quite fast), their reproduction times were in weeks and years, generating large populations required a lot of time, especially in those cases where small populations were left and genetically broad populations needed to be made. However in species which had hundreds of collected germlines, large-scale production speeded up the process however these projects were difficult to coordinate.

Plants were by in large quite easy to restore, at least by method, although they could take a long time to reproduce to large populations, they could be grown in a simple cell growth medium and transferred to agar plates to grow on. Animals proved far more problematic. Animals, especially mammals, were very difficult to recreate from single cells. A lot of the time rare species could be restored through a common surviving species, so the gestation of a rare wild cat could well be done by a domesticated species. Other species were serially cloned, making sure that until restoration there was a living example of the animal in which to gestate other embryos, and rebuild a population.

Overall the actual numbers of species lost were not as bad as predicted, and restoration was not as grand a process that was envisioned, still without this major ecosystems would have lost crucial member species, these particularly included the corals, and cryptogams, whose absence would have led to the destruction of whole ecosystems.

Restoration was far more exploited in the terraforming efforts on Mars, scientists were able to manipulate collected cells, and in doing so modify the organism to tolerate the Martian environment (starting with bacteria, and then more complicated things as the environment improved). In this way entire new species were born, this was the first true example of humanity entirely generating an ecosystem with no surface indigenous species.

Our archives of organisms are regularly updated and restocked, gaining from the new material from reintroduced species, and from the stream of new species that keep on being found. As our exploration left our own system we began also to catalog the life around other stars, enjoying the same benefits discovered from our early investigations into our own species, a lot of pharmacy and biological products are simple modifications of an existing pattern, life it seems, has a flair that still even exceeds are own artificial synthesis.