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L

ast month, at a conservation center

near Fort Collins, Colorado, staff-

ers held an unusual birthday party,

complete with a two-tiered cake

made of prairie dog and mouse

carcasses, minced meat, and kib-

ble. The recipient of the macabre

cake was a small, weasellike ani-

mal named Elizabeth Ann. She is

the world’s first cloned black-footed fer-

ret, one of North America’s most endan-

gered species, and her first birthday was

a major milestone: She is one of the first

clones of an endangered species to reach

sexual maturity.

Now, Elizabeth Ann—cloned from the

cells of a female ferret that died 35 years

ago—is poised to make history again. This

spring, if all goes as planned, Elizabeth Ann

will mate with a carefully selected bachelor

in an effort to introduce greater genetic di-

versity into wild ferret colonies, which are

threatened by inbreeding. If she gives birth

to healthy kits, it will mark the first time

conservation biologists have been able to

integrate cloning into an effort to save a

species from extinction.

Success could boost nascent efforts to

clone other endangered mammals, includ-

ing rhinos, and help establish the techno-

logy as a useful restoration tool. Failure

could reinforce long-standing skepticism

about the usefulness of cloning in conserva-

tion; some researchers see it as too expen-

sive, ethically fraught, and of limited use.

They also fear it could distract funders from

efforts to address broader issues such as

habitat destruction.

“Everything about Elizabeth Ann is much

bigger than the science behind it, and it’s

much bigger than helping the ferrets,” says

Ben Novak, black-footed ferret project lead

for Revive & Restore, a nonprofit founded

in 2012 to explore how biotechnology might

aid endangered and extinct species. “It’s

about whether biotechnology can become a

part of mainstream conservation.”

THE BLACK-FOOTED FERRET (Mustela ni-

gripes) is a slender, half-meter-long preda-

tor with an ornery streak. It once inhabited

huge swaths of the Great Plains, occupying

grassland burrows dug by its favorite prey:

prairie dogs. By the 1970s, however, the

widespread destruction of prairie dog colo-

nies by ranchers, farmers, and others had

caused ferret populations to crash. In 1973,

the ferret became one of the first species to

be designated for protection under the new

U.S. Endangered Species Act.

By the late 1970s, the last known ferret

colony had disappeared and some biologists

believed the species was extinct. But in late

1981, the Wyoming Game and Fish Depart-

ment received an unexpected call.

One morning a rancher named John Hogg

had gone out to investigate the origins of

some strange noises heard during the night.

He suspected the family dog, Shep, had

picked a fight with some varmint. Dead on

the ground was a strange, tube-shaped ani-

mal that a local taxidermist identified as a

black-footed ferret. After wildlife biologists

descended on the area around the Hogg

ranch, they were overjoyed to discover a

good-size colony of more than 100 ferrets.

But within a few years, that colony, too,

was in trouble, reduced to just a few dozen

animals. In 1985, officials made the difficult

decision to round up any ferrets they could

find, in hopes of starting a captive breed-

FEATURES

CLONING

GOES WILD

A ferret named Elizabeth Ann

could become the first cloned mammal

to help save an endangered species

By Rachel Fritts

134 14 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6577