
'Alien scene' of tadpoles feast - malvosenior
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8185125.stm
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Dilpil
I've always wondered why we wait so long to take the animals into captivity
and breed them manually. It seems like as soon as a species looked like it
might be in danger of extinction, a couple should be captured and breed- just
in case.

~~~
frossie
Breeding two animals is practically useless - the gene pool would be too
undiversified, and populations which have been brought back from the brink by
such techniques have a bunch of problems.

More to the point, the numbers are overwhelming. Thousands of vertebrate
species are threatened, not to mention plants and insects which are probably
even more valuable to the ecosystem - for example there's no point saving the
koala if eucalyptus goes extinct, because there will be nothing for the koala
to eat.

See: [http://dodosgone.blogspot.com/2007/06/extinction-rate-
estima...](http://dodosgone.blogspot.com/2007/06/extinction-rate-
estimates.html) for some numbers.

