A cloned black-footed ferret named Antonia gave birth to two healthy babies at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. This is the first time a cloned engineered species has produced offspring. Things are now looking up for the critically endangered ferret species.
Native to the North American Great Plains, black-footed ferrets were once on the brink of extinction thanks to habitat loss, disease, and the population decline of their primary food source, prairie dogs. They were so endangered at one point that they were actually believed to be fully extinct in the 20th century until a tiny population was found in Wyoming in the 1980s.
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Good news, but the bad news was that the remaining population wasn’t very genetically diverse. That shallow gene pool left them vulnerable to disease and limited their environmental adaptability.
One of the goals of the cloning project was not only to increase the number of black-footed ferrets but also to re-diversify their gene pool. Antonia was created from the genetic material of a female ferret who died in 1988 named Willa. Antonia was impregnated by a male ferret named Urchin, and this past June gave birth to three babies.
One died, but two survived — a male named Red Cloud and a female named Sibert. Antonia’s successful birthing of her kits, a term for baby ferrets, brings with it some new genetic material not present in the current black-footed ferret population, which is crucial to the species’ long-term survival.
Antonia isn’t the first successfully cloned black-footed ferret. Before her was Elizabeth Ann, the official first black-footed ferret to have ever been cloned. Elizabeth Ann was never able to reproduce but she did demonstrate the potential of cloning to restore genetic variation. Antonia and her babies will call the zoo their home for the foreseeable future so researchers can continue their, well, research.
