SciShow Tangents - Cloning

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

It may seem like cloning really only shows up regularly in science fiction, but it turns out, it's been a sneaky, significant real-world process for a super long time! In this episode we learn about cloning found in nature, labs, and...this very podcast??SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Glenn Trewitt for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! [Truth or Fail]Crayfish that’s been cloning itself might help us study prion diseaseshttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.htmlhttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/904708Scientists envision a new insect repellant while cloning hemlock treeshttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/801445Athlete’s foot fungus rejects sex for cloninghttps://today.duke.edu/2018/02/toenail-fungus-gives-sex-infect-human-hostshttps://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/208/4/1657/6084243https://gizmodo.com/the-fungi-that-cause-athletes-foot-have-given-up-on-sex-1823265768[Trivia Question]First cloned cat, which was named Copy Cathttps://vetmed.tamu.edu/news/press-releases/texas-am-says-goodbye-to-cc-worlds-first-cloned-cat/https://www.npr.org/2020/03/08/813384347/remembering-cc-the-cloned-cat[Fact Off]Electric ant queens and males sexually reproduce but actually like two different clonal speciesA 34-member “twin study” with Amazon molly fish cloneshttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1009151https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43069-6https://phys.org/news/2021-02-defeating-enemy-evolution-clone-fish.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4919929/https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/twins-study/about/[Ask the Science Couch]Cross-species cloning and back-breeding as de-extinction strategieshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223960/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4157387/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC521203/https://lsspjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2195-7819-10-3https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/species-revival-bringing-back-extinct-animalshttps://www.fws.gov/press-release/2021-02/genetic-research-boosts-black-footed-ferret-conservation-efforts[Butt One More Thing]Portuguese man o’ war is a colony of zooid clones, including gastrozooids for digesting (and maybe pooping)https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51842-1https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/portuguese-man-o-war.html

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lately competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green. And joining this week as always is science expert and Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary, Sari Reilly. Hello. And also our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hi, the and also is so dismissive. And also.

And who cares. And this other man. And more importantly, our resident everyman. What about that, Sam? I like that better. Can we change the show flow to say that? Yeah Number one guest of the show number number apps top of the top of the charts. It's Sam Schultz. You hurt me even worse I'm a permanent guest I

Don't know I say I'm the host so you guys are the guests. I guess that's true. Where your piano works Yeah, my panel. Can I ask you a question, panel? Sure. So if and when they invent a technology to do instantaneous transportation of your body to a new place, but what actually is happening is your body is being recreated in that new place and the body that exists here is being destroyed.

And if you had just not destroyed that body, then there would have been two of you. How are you feeling about using that technology? This is just something I always have such a problem with on Star Trek, because they didn't have to say that that's what happens. Right? Do they say that that's what happens?

Basically, because there's two Rikers, you know, there's two Rikers. Is there a moment where there's two Rikers because of the transporter? One Riker's evil and he escapes into space. And he's causing all kinds of mischief out there. I would be okay with it. I wouldn't be afraid of teleporting. I would just try not to think about it too hard. But when you think about it, it's like, then what's the what are we doing here? Why? Why? But I guess you have to destroy one of you. So I would live with it. Because going anywhere instantly would be great because you

Want to get to Hawaii without having to take the whole plane? Oh, please. I would love to I hate flying in planes more than I Hate being molecularly deconstructed What if you knew that at the last minute when you're being deconstructed you were like Oh, yeah, and it hurt so bad, but you never got to know how bad it hurt Yeah, at what point does your consciousness transfer? Well, the consciousness doesn't transfer. It's just reconstructed entirely perfectly. You wouldn't notice a break in consciousness

in the same way that you don't notice a break in consciousness when you wake up after you go to sleep. But you are a new guy. But you're new. I'm of the impression that you can totally do this because it happens every night anyway. Like every night, I go to bed, my consciousness ceases, I am no longer me, and then I wake back up

and I'm me again and I'm like, well I have the same song in my head as I did when I went to sleep. So it's just like falling asleep, but then you wake up in Hawaii. And you know that the you who fell asleep is dead now. Yeah, that would be the hard part I think, is knowing that, but I feel like in some way,

isn't past me already dead? All my skin cells have sloughed off. I don't know, like five-year-old Sari was so different than current Sari. Isn't she teleported away in some way? Yes, consciousness is an illusion and five-year-old Sari is dead. I feel like even more immediately one second ago, Sam.

Yeah, I've forgotten everything about myself last week. Last week, Sarri, a new me, new week, new me. That's what I always say. Yeah, I don't know. I've been around for so long now, I've forgotten almost everything that's ever happened to me. And I feel like all those people who had those experiences are dead. Well, would you do it? Would you be okay with it, Hank? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

If it got me to Hawaii real quick. Oh, so we're all on the same page. of our dead. What would you do it? Would you be okay with it, Hank? Oh yeah, absolutely. If it got me to Hawaii real quick, ugh. So we're all on the same page? We would murder ourselves? How can you, I don't know. I don't know. I guess every now and then I'd be sitting in bed at night and think, dear God, what have I done?

And all of humanity would think the same thing. And then we'd all just go to sleep. Wake up the next day. That's the real power of humans. They were like, boy, this seems wrong. And yet we do it anyway. Hunk-shoe. Time to go to bed. I'll eat my chicken nuggets and then all, yeah, do the...

All my other human things. I can't wait till they can, atom by atom, reconstruct a chicken so that I can eat it without guilt That's gonna be the best that they just do all of it except for the head Yeah, but will you like everybody will always be eating the same chicken nugget every day The same chicken nugget Yeah, sure. That doesn't bother me at all. That's already that's the situation with the lab-grown meat It's just the same cell over and over again.

Yes, that's true. Gross. But good, but bad. But don't ban it for no reason. That's my thing. It's just weird. Let's just settle on weird. Yeah, let's just let people decide whether or not

they wanna eat that. Eat that cell. Eat that cell. I totally wanna eat that cell. Eat that cell. I'd love to eat the cell. Eat that cell. I'd love to eat the cell. Cell is yummy.

Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up Amaze and Delay each other with science facts. And then, no, you also try to stay on topic. But I have messed that up today. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Box, which I'll be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. But as always, we must introduce this week's science topic with the traditional science poem, this week from Sam. For this poem, I have a little special surprise

in the form of a special guest. I'd like you to meet Clone Sam. Hi Clone Sam. So, cause I've gotten really busy lately, so I made this clone of myself to take over all of my tangents responsibilities. And one way that we're going to sort of pass the baton is we're going to present this poem

about cloning together. Are you ready clone Sam? I'm ready regular Sam. All right. You might think you're special, but you're not because you're just made up of a lot of little codes in DNA that we can read and then relay to stem cells which then Proceed to make a new you yes indeed someone who's almost basically you to do the stuff You don't want to do like host a science comedy show or do the dishes and shovel snow Or to harvest organs from when you get old?

Yes clones are great. It's you. All right. Well, I'll leave you guys to it. Nice hosting a podcast with you What was that part about the? It's been great to know you. The organs? See you later. Bye everybody. Okay Hi, Clone Sam. No, that was the regular one. Oh shoot Hi everybody. That was that was our poem. Do you think I need to worry about the organ thing? I don't know. You could probably go get him right now. Track him down. He ran really fast out of the room.

Did he? Well, look, you can take over his whole life. All you have to do is murder him in his sleep. That's a really good point. Okay. Okay, that's what I'll do. You could take his organs, in fact. It's a race for who gets the organ.

Somebody's taking somebody's organs. Organ race! Organ race! Well, it's nice to be here. I listen to every episode 50 times. So I know everything about Sam's life in the show. You are way ahead of us. Yeah, I know more than he did. That's for damn sure. So the topic of the day is cloning. But before we dive in, we're gonna take a short break,

then be back to define what the heck that is. So, Zary, I feel like we can define what cloning is. To me, it's just like, it's when there's, that you create a second, either artificially or naturally, organism that has the exact same DNA. Well, not exact same, but like same DNA. Like, there's no like, genomic mixing going on. The offspring is the same as the parent.

Yeah, the genetic information is the same. I think that's it. And in colloquial use, cloning just means copying. So if you like have a voice clone or a clone of a website, it's just copying. But yeah, biologically speaking, cloning is genetic copies. And there are lots of ways that happens in nature. And then there are lots of ways, I guess a few ways, many fewer ways that we humans have

figured out how to do it. Plants use cloning all the time. It's a natural form of reproduction and some plants form clonal colonies of themselves. So, Pando, those Aspen trees, a classic example of a giant clonal colony where they share the same... Pando is like a specific thing, right? That is... Is that right? Yeah. So, it's like technically one tree. It's a quaking Aspen tree. But there are many different stems that appear like different trees. Like if you looked in the environment with our human eyes and looked at it, it'd be like, oh, that's a forest. That's a bunch of trees.

That's like tens of thousands of trees, but. It's just one panda. It's one panda. It's one guy. All connected. It's just one guy. Is it a little bit weird that panda has a name? Because most of the time when there's a forest,

I don't call it a name. I call it the something forest or the something national forest more commonly in the US. But I don't usually like come up and be like, this is Pando the forest. Behold Pando. This is like a man's name. Well, I think it's cause he's a guy.

I, a forest is a lot of different guys and you wouldn't like it if someone walked up to you and all your buddies and was like, oh, that's Hank over there. But if you and a bunch of clones of you were all joined connected by our fingertips, I'd be like, oh, that's Hank. We are Hank. Was there a point like like they must have thought he was, it was whatever was just like a forest. Was there one day where they were like, oh, wait a second, you are Pando or what? That's a great question. I don't know.

I didn't look it up. I don't know. Look it up. When the Pando clone was discovered, scientists named it with a Latin word that means I spread. Pando is an Aspen clone that originated from a single seed and spreads by sending up new shoots from expanding root system. According to the US Forest Service.

They should have given him a better name. That's a creepy name. That's a demon's name. I spread. Yeah. Yeah, there's this like sort of slime mold. But it makes sense that we discovered it in a plant. So the word cloning to jump around a little bit,

was coined by an American plant physiologist named Herbert J. Weber in 1903. And he got the word clone from the ancient Greek word that was also clone, which meant twig, where we see cloning or propagation in plants really easily where if you break off part of a house plant at a node or if you get, I don't know, like a twig, but you can't just get any twig, got to get something that's still living, stick it in the ground, stick

in some dirt, you can grow a new tree, you can grow a new plant, you're cloning it. And so it was first identified as a process in plants where you have one thing, you have a genetically identical second plant. And Herbert did a bad job at first and spelled it C-L-O-N. Oh, boo. Which, it looks wrong. Yeah, it looks gross. But because I think he was mimicking the Greek spelling, which was in Greek letters, like K-L-O-N, just clone. But in 1905, a different American botanist suggested clone with an E and plural of clones

as the correct form of the word, because he also was like, no, no, no, Herbert, that won't do. That won't do in American English. We're going to go around saying, Klon, and that's even more scary and bad. It's very nice to see an example of a scientist being like, actually we can do this better. We can say it nicer. It wouldn't have taken root, I believe, in sci-fi as much if it was called Klon also. Klon is such a perfect sci-fi word.

Klon Wars. The Klon Wars. We've done the Clone Wars half. So other things, as we found other things were genetic clones, then we started using the words to describe them. So plants, I think, were the first things that we kind of identified as clones, and that's where the word came from. In 1929, we started using clone to refer to bacteria. So the way that bacteria divide or bud off of each other

asexually produce genetic clones of one another. And then in 1982, we started using it to refer to animals. And the idea of how can we clone. Is that what you said? Yeah, how can we clone animals from one another? 1970 was kind of where it started in sci-fi, like hypothetically. Could we create artificially produced identical people or aliens or whatnot? But it was theoretical.

And then 1982, we were like, I think we can do, I think we're going to try this. I think we're going to try and make other animals. Make a guy. From animals. Yeah. There are people now who have now have clones of their dead dogs, and that is not that unusual. And I think it should be. You think it should be?

Well, yeah, there's a lot of dogs out there who need our help. I yeah, I don't know. It just seems like it just seems like a lot of pressure to put on a dog to be like, I loved this dog. And now I now you are like the literal replacement. And you must be like, I loved this dog and now you are the literal replacement and you must be like that new dog is going to be like, I'm not exactly that dog, I'm sorry. And do, I guess this is like a big question, but do they have, like would your brain, is there even a prayer your brain would work the same way if you were cloned exactly?

Well, I mean, we got twins, so we know that, no, these people are different people. Oh, speaking of, does that mean that twins are clones, but that cell cloned itself in the womb once time? Yes, I will talk about this a little bit later in my fact doc, but monozygotic twins are clones. They're identical twins are clones because one cell became two cells, and instead of staying as one embryo, twins are clones. They're identical twins are clones because one cell became two cells

and instead of staying as one embryo, they just like split off into two embryos and they start with the exact same genetics. Fraternal twins are two eggs fertilized by two sperms, so they have as close genetics as siblings would. But those identical twins are basically human clones, as ethically made as possible. I would like to be a clone. I think that it would be cool to be twins. I think that in the future, this is a prediction.

Everybody get ready. 40 years from now, people will pay to have twins and they'll pay extra money to the doctor to be like, we want to have identical twins. I would like to have a twin, but I wouldn't like to have a clone, like a new me clone, I suppose. But yeah, I think, I don't know. No, I wouldn't like to have a twin. I think it would be harmful for me to see myself and to see just everything reflected

back at me. I wouldn't appreciate that. I wouldn't appreciate that. I don't need that. I'm enough in my own head as it is. One of me is plenty enough. What if your clone was so much more successful than you, wouldn't that just really suck? But there's like, you know, there's that like third Hemsworth and that sucks for him anyway. I guess if your brother or any family member is successful than you, that does stink.

I take it back then. So cloning also, I guess the one other meaning of cloning is what I did in undergrad, which is like molecular cloning or gene cloning that you use to, you generally use bacteria, but it is a lab procedure that you can use to make copies of genes or certain segments of DNA that you want to study. That's just what the procedure is called because you take advantage of bacteria's ability to create genetic clones of itself and you just create a bacterial genome, like a plasmid is specifically what it is, like circular DNA.

Then you cut out a slice of the circle and you put in whatever gene you want in there, and then you put that genetic material into the bacteria and then you let it multiply thousands or millions of times, and then you kill them all, and then you harvest their DNA, and then you filter out the gene that you want, and you say, thank you, or you make them produce a protein if you want. I don't know, if that gene produces a protein, then you can like feed them whatever ingredients they need to make that protein, have them synthesize a bunch of protein and then kill them and then harvest their protein instead too.

Bacteria really the... They're getting killed and harvested no matter which way you slice it though. Well, one thing you gotta know about bacteria is you don't have to feel bad about killing them and they were gonna die anyway. Okay. And you do it every, in your gut, in your body.

Oh yeah. The circle of life is going on constantly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel like I know what cloning is and I also feel like I know more than I did just a short while ago, which means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show.

Are you guys ready? Yep. Yes. Even if we humans have not figured out a way to clone ourselves, we've spent plenty of time studying organisms that do clone themselves. And sometimes, just because it's cool, and sometimes because it helps us better understand ourselves, because it's important to understand ourselves,

because we keep getting sick and we don't want to do that. So today, we're going to be playing Truth or Fail Clone Edition. I'll present to you three stories of a medical discovery, but only one of them is true. Which one is it? Story number one, marbled crayfish. Are crayfish that can produce hundreds of eggs at a time without mating, producing a population

that is entirely female clones of the mother crayfish. A 2018 study found that these clone crayfish also produce a protein similar to the prion responsible for mad cow disease, though it doesn't affect the crayfish, making it a useful model for scientists to better understand that disease. But that might be fake, so don't let it stick in your head for too long. It might be fake, so don't let it stick in your head for too long. It might be story number two. Hemlock trees in the US have been under siege by an insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid. In 2019, scientists reported that they had successfully cloned hemlock trees from frozen

samples of emulsified bark. When they planted these cloned hemlocks, they were surprised to find that the overall population was more resistant to adelgid attack. They found that adelgids tend to avoid a preservative used during the cloning process, suggesting this preservative may make for a useful insect repellent. Or it might be story number three! Many fungi can reproduce through sexual or asexual means, but there are some species that choose primarily asexual reproduction, including the fungus that causes athlete's foot.

A 2018 study found that even when set up with other mating types for five months, this fungus would not sexually reproduce, and the researchers found that the samples were around 99.97% identical, making them almost exact clones of each other. So what is it? Is it the crayfish that's been cloning itself and might help us study prion diseases? Is it scientists envisioning a new insect repellent while cloning hemlock trees?

Or is it that athletes foot fungus rejects sex for cloning? I don't know how you clone a tree. The stick. You get a stick. Oh, you do the stick. It's right there in the name, Sari. You're right.

It's right there in the name. I said it, but. Yes, clone means stick. Yeah. The name, Sari. You're right. It's right there in the I said it, but yes, clone means stick. Sari from whatever 10 minutes ago is dead. I teleported here. Yeah, I just think that one seems like something that Deboki started to reveal the magic that Deboki writes these that Deboki wouldn't click on this and be like, that's interesting. I think she'd make this up and be like, that's maybe interesting. I don't know.

Yeah, bark goo. Now that you've reminded me of what I said, what past non-clones Dary has said about twigs, bark goo sounds very suspicious. What's the goo got in it? Nothing. Nothing useful for us. So the crayfish, I don't know how much. Crustaceans have centralized brains? They have some sort of, they must have some sort of like centralized nervous system, right? I mean, I'm southern and I know that you can suck the meat out of the head of a crawfish and nobody ever says you're eating the brain of the crawfish. So maybe you're right.

So prion disease is what I know them. It's like mad cow disease is a prion disease. It's like brain tissue, but I don't know if there's enough, maybe it's like nervous system, whatnot, but I don't know. When I think of crayfish, I don't think of like, oh, there's like a brain disease going on there, which is maybe speciesist of me to say.

That's rude. Yeah, pretty rude about the marbled crayfish. What do you think about the third one, though? That seems too weird to make up. It seems really random that you would just study athletes. I don't know what kind of fungus athlete's foot is. You'd be like, come on, guys, start doing it down there. They are very not into foot stuff.

They're chased. Yes. Yeah. They hate being on foot. Big turn off for athletes. They really kink shame, uh, foot fetishists. And they're like, no, no, no. Wow.

Just cause that was so convincing. I, the, the crawfish one, crayfish, crawfish, crawfish sounds so familiar to me. That I'm gonna kick myself for not picking that one, but I do think the athlete's foot one. I also think the athlete's foot, I talked myself out of the crayfish one, which maybe I talked you out of it too. Yeah, I think we're wrong.

So who knows? I'm sticking with it. Well, in 2018, researchers published are the result of a study on 135 samples of trichophyton rubrum, which is the fungus responsible for athlete's foot. It sounds like that. And they found 134 of the samples were of the same mating type, which was surprising.

And when they tried to introduce the fungi to other mating types, they found that it wouldn't reproduce, except instead they found that the species were almost exact clones of each other, suggesting that the fungus might be primarily clonal, just asexual reproduction. And they think that it became asexual relatively recently in the grand scheme of evolution because its genome is still about the same size compared to other fungi. If it had been asexual for longer, it would be more likely like a reduced genome, also it would be more dependent on humans. The fact that the fungus aren't genetically diverse could be good news, actually, for researchers looking to target athletes foot fungus,

because if you can find something that gets one of them and get all of them. That's happened to bananas, right? That's what happened to bananas. But we have to have it happen to our feet and elsewhere. Just all the crevices. So yeah, two points, one to each of you. In the case of the hemlock trees, scientists have been trying to clone hemlock trees thanks to these hemlock woolly adelgids, which inject toxins into the tree.

Hemlocks are of course important ecologically because they keep streambakes safe from erosion and provide shelter for wildlife. One way scientists are working to try to address the challenge is to create hybrids of hemlocks with Asian hemlocks that are more naturally resistant to woolly indulgence and then clone those hybrids. As for the crawfish, the most interesting thing about marbled crayfish is that the species didn't exist until a few decades ago,

when a mutation in another species caused a female crayfish to be able to reproduce via parthenogenesis, meaning her eggs would develop into embryos without fertilization. Scientists think that marbled crayfish got their start with two slough crayfish that were imported from Florida to Germany. Despite being made up of just clones, the species of crayfish has been able to survive in all sorts of environments through Europe and Africa. And in 2018, scientists published a report

on the genome of the crayfish. In a press release, the scientists suggested that the adaptability of the marbled crayfish may make them useful for learning about epigenetic mechanisms, which describe how chemical tags can turn on or off different areas of DNA. And in turn, they suggest that this might make the crayfish useful as a way to understand the development of how epigenetic mechanisms contribute to development of tumors.

So it's just like, I can do this now? That's just how it goes sometimes? Yeah, they can just do it now. And since they can, they are, because it's really quite quick to do if you can. It's easy. But in general, species like that don't last forever, because just like the athletes, but if one thing goes wrong with one of them, you can get them all. All right, next up we're going to take another short break.

Then it will be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody! Get ready for the fact-off! Our panelists have both brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they've presented their facts, I will judge them brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they've presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks to the most mind-blowing fact. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. Humans have figured out how to clone a number of different animals, including cats.

The first cloned cat was created in part by scientists at Texas A&M who used DNA from a female domestic shorth hair named Rainbow and then transferred the embryo into a surrogate mother. Two months later, the cloned cat named Copycat was born. What year was Copycat born in? Oh, sweet Copycat. It is cute. Yeah, that's really cute.

You said that we shouldn't clone pets, but Maya Cat's getting really old and I just think, oh, I'd like to have another go around with her, but I think calico cats maybe don't clone with the same spots. I feel like I've heard that before. Oh yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. So she wouldn't be quite right. I'll just get another one, I guess.

Yeah, it's not really about what's in the mind. It's about the fur spots. Yeah, I don't know who she is. Well, Sarah, you said, like, the 80s. Well, I think... Do you want me to give you... I'll narrow her range. No! LAUGHS

Why wouldn't I want that? I gotta help clone Sam out. So, Dolly the sheep was in the 90s. Okay. So, the 90s is what the range you gave me is. Or the 90s is the beginning, past the 90s. Past the 90s. And you can help out Clone Sam because Clone Sam is gonna have a totally different score from Regular Sam, so this is an account towards Sam's total.

Yeah. No. Do I have to start all over again? I don't know, if you bring Regular Sam back, he can start back from his... What if I bring back his head? Can I have all those points? Yeah, I think that's how it works. If you best one of us in armed combat, then you just get to be the cohost

of the show, I guess. Any of you. I get to kill any of you. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You're a clone. So you don't have any morals. Yeah. It's like Highlander. I absorb all your points until I just have all the points. OK. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going all the points, okay. I like that. Yeah.

I'm gonna guess first, and I'm gonna guess the year 2000. I'm gonna guess 2006. The answer was the year 2001. Oh, yes. So close. Sam gets to go first. Great year to make a clone.

This sounds so futuristic, doesn't it? Oh, by the way, also I should say, Copycat went on to have her own kittens when she was five years old. And despite being a clone, Copycat was more orange than a rainbow, and their personalities also seemed different from each other. And Copycat died in 2020 at the age of 18. Oh, wow. Good for Copycat.

It's a lovely long life for a little cat. Okay, so the way most colony based ants reproduce goes something like this. A colony has a queen and that queen spends her time laying eggs that hatch into sterile, sterile, sterile worker ants. But sometimes the queen will lay eggs that hatch into winged female and male ants, which are capable of reproduction. These winged ants and fly out into the world, they meet ants from other colonies, and they mate. The males pretty much it seems like break off their entire sex organ into the female that they mate with, and then they go off to die. And the female goes off to

become a queen and populate a new colony by laying eggs fertilized with the sperm from the male ants sex organ. So basically the ants mate once and the queen gets a lifetime supply of sperm to fertilize eggs and then the whole thing starts over again. And as is often the way with sexual reproduction, the ants that come out of these eggs have genes from the male and the female ant. Not cloning at all, so not a very good cloning fact. But in 2005, genetic analysis of the little fire ant, aka the electric ant, a species of ant, I'm saying ant a lot, native to Central and South America, but found as an invasive species pretty much all over the world, revealed that these little critters

buck the traditions of sexual reproduction in some weird and sort of rude ways. So researchers were doing some standard genetic research on electric ants, not expecting to find anything too weird because these ants live in colonies. They have sterile workers and fertile males and females who do the whole ant thing, go off to mate. But what they discovered was that the fertile female offspring of queen ants, the winged ants who one day will become queens themselves, were genetically identical to the queen that birthed them. These female ants were clones of their mothers, though they did use the male sperm to create the sterile workers, effectively leaving male electric ants out in the cold when it

comes to passing on their genetic information. Poor little loser guys. Except when they took a look at the male ants, they discovered that the males didn't have any DNA from the queen ant either. The researchers found that when an egg that will hatch into a male is fertilized, the female DNA is somehow neutralized and the resulting male ant is the result of only male DNA. So in effect, the gene pool of the male

and the female ants of this species never mix and every male and female ant born is a clone of its mother or father." So the researchers describe these ants as being in an obligate symbiosis at this point. So the females need the sperm from the males to create the workers to do all the stuff that workers do, like keep the queen alive. And the male ants need the eggs from the queen ants to make more little man babies. So it's sort of like two species of ant that just happened to hatch out of the same egg.

What the heck? And of course, this is probably not very good for the genetic wellbeing of these little freaky guys, but they're a harmful invasive species that eats scorpions, spiders, native ants, and even baby tortoises on Galapagos Islands. So fuck them, who cares? They're little assholes. Spiders, native ants, and even baby tortoises on Galapagos Islands. So, fuck them.

Who cares? They're little assholes. Then maybe we can, maybe just like the fungus and bananas and the other thing we were talking about. We can kill them. Yeah, soft charges. That's very weird. How long has it been like this?

Do they have any idea? No, they didn't know, but it seems so like, how did the male, it's not like the male answer like, hey, wait a minute, I guess we better figure out how to make our sperm do this, if you're gonna do this to us. It just happened, but I don't know. They didn't know how long it's been going on like this for.

The thing about this fact is that it feels way cooler to me than I feel like it would to an audience. Oh, come on. I'm just saying. I'm an audience. It felt cool to be. Yeah, it's blowing my mind, but I think most people think like, oh, animals make babies in lots of different ways.

And it's like, not really. Not this way. It's mostly just the one way once you get complex. Sperm-destroying DNA feels pretty weird. I feel like emphasizing that is weird for anyone. It neutralizes it somehow. It just says, you stay over there, I think. We're going to take care of things over here.

Wasn't quite clear on how that exactly worked, and maybe they're not sure either, because it's probably teeny, teeny tiny when it's happening. The eggs, if the ants are little, the eggs are even littler. They got to come out of the ants, so that must be the case. Okay, Sarah, what do you got? So one of the ways that scientists try and study the age-old question of is something nature or nurture are twin studies.

So when you have identical twins, aka monozygotic twins that came from a single fertilized egg that's split, you basically have two genetic clones. And the reasoning behind twin studies is that their genetics start the same, but there could be changes to biology based on environmental factors. So like the Scott and Mark Kelly twin study by NASA where one identical twin brother was in space for a year and the other stayed on Earth. What was happening environmentally because their genetics were functionally the same. But how much of what we attribute to the environment

or nurture are actually part of our genetics? A 2023 study looked into this sort of question with a freshwater fish species that is entirely made up of clones, the Amazon molly. So Amazon mollies are all female and reproduce asexually, but the specific process is extra weird because it's called sperm-dependent parthenogenesis. So maybe kind of more similar to these ants than different. Basically they produce eggs that are full genetic clones, but they need to trick a fish

from another closely related species like an Atlantic, a sailfin, or a Tama Sea molly to mate with them because the sperm triggers embryo development even though it isn't genetically incorporated into the eggs at all. What the hell? So very weird. They're like, come have sex so that I can make full eggs, but then the eggs are just clones.

And all that weirdness to say, they're a species of all female clones. And in this 2023 paper, the researchers basically did a giant twin study of 34 genetically identical offspring of one Amazon molly over 280 days or 40 weeks. So after these 34 babies were born, they were separated into 34 identical tanks

and monitored super closely with cameras. And they were found to quote, exhibit strong behavioral individuality during the first four weeks of life, from how much they swam around to how much food they ate. And then the researchers moved them to 34 identical breeding tanks. I don't know, the tanks look, I think, just slightly different with males. And then they swapped the females around randomly once a week to make sure that they weren't stuck with the same male.

And this was a male of a different species just to like trigger reproduction when they were ready to get down and dirty. And they monitored them closely to see how they reproduced when in their lives, how many babies they had and how big those babies were. And in the end, they measured 2,522 offspring from 152 broods of these fish. And some patterns that they observed sort of made sense. Fish that ate more food got bigger, and bigger fish made a bigger offspring and reproduced later in life.

But there were also some mysteries, like how much food the fish ate didn't affect how many babies they had, just like how big those babies were. And- How big the babies were? Yeah, so bigger fish made bigger babies, but you didn't necessarily make more babies, which you think-

But they're all clones, including the babies. All babies clones, yeah, all fish, all babies clones. The males are the only ones that aren't clones, but they're not even the same species. But they're not even the same species. Yeah, how active they were, like swimming around their tanks, didn't seem to correlate at all with their reproduction or anything

like that. So there's this whole question of where all these behavioral differences came from and where all these reproductive fitness differences came from. Because some of them seem like if you're just talking about the biological need to continue your species forward, they have very different ways of doing that, even though they're clones with identical environments, as far as the researchers could tell. So there's probably way more to genetics that we know about, whether it's tiny environmental influences or DNA modifications during development or like where these sort of behavioral things

come from, which is very weird. It's things like this that make me very skeptical of anyone who's claiming that we're going to fix big, complicated body problems in the next 40 years. People who think the singularity is near, I'm like, the singularity is a long way away, you guys. We don't even know what's going on with these 2,000 fish clones. They're exactly the same and they're all very different. You have no idea why.

And they live the same exact life, basically. They're just swimming around the same place. They're all swimming around, a tiny little tank in a tiny little lab, and they all got different little behaviors, different little food preferences. Yeah, and they're simple. Mollies are a simple fish.

I mean, fish are simpler know mammals anyway, but like thing as a big big gap between Knowing a lot and knowing everything I don't know. Maybe they'll fix death. That sounds great. Keep at it you guys. I'm not saying you shouldn't try I just I'm I'm expressing my skepticism. So I definitely am in a situation where I think that it would be easier

for a broad audience to get the Molly story. But I think that Sam's fact about these ants that are two separate clones is more mind blowing. I am like, boo. So I think I'm gonna go with Sam, clone Sam. I've been on a cold streak. So this feels pretty good.

I mean, the other guy was on a cold streak. I listened to those episodes. Yeah, that's right. You're hot. Yeah, I'm smart Sam. That's my thing. Yeah, you're smart Sam. I've been great. You know what will make you even smarter? Yeah.

Is when you go and eat his heart I was thinking his brain. I don't know for some reason brain seemed grosser to me. I couldn't say it Only both anyway, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, you're hungry And now it's time to ask the science couch where we've got a listener question for our couch of finally honed scientific minds Bell five seven three34 on YouTube asked, cloning is always mentioned when discussing strategies for de-extinction. If we were to actually use it to bring back a species, wouldn't it create a genetic bottleneck since we have limited DNA samples? It certainly would,

unless we don't have limited DNA samples. Like, I'm sure that there are some species we have more genetic information for, but then also you can do stuff. The thing is like you look around at American bison and there's very few bison herds that don't have some amount of cow DNA in them. And so you can do stuff like that. Or if you need to introduce genetic information,

you'd be like, okay, we don't have any more of this kind of rhino, but we have other rhinos. And so let's just like spice up their genes so that they're not all entirely super inbred by having some other rhino genes from other rhinos. But then like, did you bring that back, that species or not? But we've already done some of this work where we have like, think, Shavalsky's horse is where we've had,

I don't know if we did cloning, but we did a thing where there was like a surrogate mother with Shavalsky's horse. So like a normal horse gave birth to this rare horse as part of a captive breeding program where they're trying to, and succeeded to get them back in their native habitats. But I don't know, I'm talking to my butt here.

So, Sari, how'd I do? Yeah, I think you're pretty spot on about both the genetic bottlenecking and the, I don't know, the questions that you wanna ask before you de-extinct anything and put in the effort. Because even cloning your dog is tens of thousands of dollars. It's really, really expensive and complicated to do.

I mean, that's expensive, but if I'm going to get a whole rhino out of the deal, it seems worth it. Yeah, but it's many, many more, I think, hundreds of thousands of dollars because we know how to do it in dogs. We know how to do it. And also, there's lots of dogs around. There's lots of dogs around. You can't have a rhino baby inside a dog.

Yeah. Yes, you can't. And you have to put a rhino baby in inside a rhino. And there's a lot of like science that goes into being able to. So the idea of cloning a rhino or a woolly mammoth or something. So you need to have the DNA

that of the thing that you want to clone. And you can get that if you're talking about a rhino, like from one of the living members of the species, if you're talking about something that's already extinct, like a mammoth or a passenger pigeon or something, you need to collect that from samples preserved in the ice or museum samples. And maybe that's a complete genome,

maybe it's incomplete and you have to stitch it together. And so you have to basically come up with the animal's genome, that's like step one. And then you have to get a reproductive cell, an egg, to insert that material into. So the way that Dolly the sheep was cloned, the way that a lot of dogs are cloned, cats are cloned, a lot of animal cloning nowadays,

in my understanding is through somatic cell nuclear transfer. So basically that means somatic cells are non-reproductive cells, so they take the genome from any cell. In Dolly's case, it was like a mammary gland. In the case of woolly mammoths, you've extracted it from a mummified corpse and you have it. And then you need to find a way to extract elephant eggs. And that's not like a thing that we do all the time. Like we know how to do IVF in humans, we know how to do IVF in dogs at this point.

We don't really know the best ways to sedate an elephant and stick a giant needle into its ovaries and extract eggs successfully from an elephant. I can figure it out. Hank's got it down. We got to do that. Then you got to empty those eggs. You got to empty the nucleus from those eggs, stick in the genetics that you want to, and then successfully implant that embryo into the womb of an elephant, have it take, develop

a baby, and then the baby has to come out. And then this hybrid mammoth, I guess it will be genetically a mammoth, has to learn how to be a mammoth from the elephants around it. With no mammoths to help. No mammoths to help it do so. They'll probably end up behaviorally kind of acting like an elephant if it survives. And then on top of that, you have to like do that multiple times and then introduce genetic diversity that way if they can successfully mate with each other

and whatnot or have it mate with elephants and then you've got this like hybridized situation going on. Can you imagine just sort of being like mad about it? If I'm like the only wooly mammoth in a whole herd of elephants being like, everybody hates me and I hate everybody. It's the ugly duck.

Because I'm so hairy and they aren't hairy. Maybe they think he's cool. And they're like, if we have babies with him, our babies will have really cool hairdos. Yes, I guess. Yeah, maybe it's like that. Give him some baggy pants. Yeah, he's a grown elephant. I'm just a grown elephant.

Put him in a flannel. But yeah, so I think there are many steps before the genetic bottlenecking, but then yeah, you have to decide whether you want to repeat that with other mammoth genes and grow a bunch of different mammoths or introduce elephant DNA or, I don't know, some other mysterious thing. And species have come back from pretty severe bottlenecks. Like cheetahs are notoriously pretty genetically similar because of a bottleneck around 10,000 years ago.

They barely avoid extinction at the end of the last ice age and now they're really, really genetically similar and that isn't being helped by poaching and whatnot. And so species have naturally bounced back from genetic bottlenecks, but the worry of those things is like bananas, if there's a disease that they're all susceptible to, they can get wiped out pretty easily. So then you have questions around strategies for de-extinction of is it even worth it? Is it even worth all the time and money and energy poured into conservation to de-extinction of, is it even worth it? Is it even worth all the time and money and energy poured into conservation to de-extinct something

through cloning when you could focus on maybe cloning an organism of an existing population? So like taking cheetahs that already exist and like helping with conservation efforts, if you can clone a cheetah that can introduce genetic variability in the population. And what would a mammoth be doing in the elephant ecosystem? Maybe he's a cool dude who all the elephants want to hang with. Maybe he's a menace and he kills all the elephants.

And then we've got a bigger problem on our hands where we've de-extincted mammoths and we've extincted elephants because he was a bad dude. And then, so I don't know, consequences of our actions, all the sci-fi questions. But it's not sexy to just clone a boring old cheetah. It's sexy to clone a mammoth, you know? Yeah. And that's the thing too, is like they're the sexy animals. They call them charismatic animals because they want to keep it. You can't call them sexy animals, I understand. You can. You can. You can is a, yeah.

But should we? Charismatic is so funny. It's like they're hanging out at a bar or something though. That animal has a great personality. Elephants. Big mammals. Yeah, elephants and mammoths and ferrets are all charismatic animals. A lot of mammals.

We like mammals because we're humans. But when possibly some of the more impactful species that we could de-extinct are certain insects or fish, but no one... It's harder to get funding for de-extinction of birds or fish or insects when everyone's like, oh, that elephant, that hairy elephant, that would be cool. We need him back. Well, I'll tell you, one thing I feel like I've learned about billionaires in the last 10 years or so

is that if they can figure out how to bring back woolly mammoths and make like a park you can go to and drive past woolly mammoths, they will absolutely do it. Like they're gonna do it. We've made so many movies that say, don't do this. They don't care. And they're like, yeah, like what I have learned

from this exercise in trying to instruct humans to not be so hubristic is everyone would pay attention to me if I brought back wooly mammoths and they talk about me on the news and that's the one thing I can't buy. Then they talk about me getting stomped on by one of my wooly mammoths, and they talk about me on the news, and that's the one thing I can't buy. Then they talk about me getting stomped on by one of my wooly mammoths. Yes, you gotta get injured,

you gotta get gored by a mammoth tusk. You can get on that Wikipedia page that's people who are killed by their own inventions. If you wanna ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, or check out our YouTube community tab where we'll send out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord.

Thank you to at KnitsandLaffs and at FelifHe on Twitter and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you liked this show and you want to help us out, super easy to do that, first you go to patreon.com slash SciShowTangents, become a patron, get access to our Discord and our bonus content. Also like our Minions commentary, shout out to patron Les Aker for their support. Second, you can give us a review wherever you listen,

that's very helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us, I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I'm Sam Schultz now. SciShow Tantrum is created by all of us

and produced by Jess Stempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Jaboukie Charper Vardy. Our sound designer is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green.

And of course, we could not make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. The Portuguese Manowar looks sort of like a jellyfish, but it's a Cephonophore, which is actually a colony of genetically identical but specialized clones called zooids. Cephonophores are sort of like nature's version of three kids in a trench coat working together as one unit to survive. So, some of those zooids help the colony float in water, some help it reproduce, and some, called gastrozooids, help it digest food. So, basically,

gastrozooids are gut clones, which probably work as mouths and butts, too. Or at least they're close enough to butt clones, given how weird and hard to study these creatures are. I've never understood a Portuguese Man O' War. Other jellyfish aren't like that, right? It just looks like those guys, but- There are other things that are like that, but they aren't that way like that, where the different elements of it are so differentiated.

If you look up Siphonophore, most of them look like long and tubby and live in the deep ocean. The weird thing about the Portuguese Man O' War is it looks super like a jellyfish. Yeah, and also stings super like a jellyfish. I can attest to this. Have you experienced it? You got it in Stunberg?

You have? I have, in Florida. It was very, very painful. I thought those were one where you get died. I was not happy. Yeah, I thought that punched your ticket. That was it. No, I didn't punch my ticket. Okay.

I think you can survive a Portuguese man-o-war sting having done it. I don't know how often they punch your ticket. No, it says it's rarely deadly to people. It packs a painful punch and causes welts on exposed skin. You're not so tough. I survived something that is rarely deadly.