Near the early 1940s, the Xerces blue butterfly was last seen fluttering its iridescent periwinkle wings in San Francisco. It's widely assumed to be extinct, the first American insect species to be wiped off by urbanization. However, there are some doubts over whether it was ever a separate species or perhaps a sub-population of another popular butterfly.
Even though DNA is a stable molecule, it degrades with time. Every cell, however, has DNA, and scientists may reconstruct the original form by comparing several strands of DNA code. "It's as if you built a lot of similar Lego towers and then dumped them. Individual buildings would be shattered, but if you looked at them all together, you could see the original structure's shape, "Moreau agrees.
Grewe, Moreau, and their colleagues compared the genetic sequence of the Xerces blue butterfly to that of the more common silvery blue butterfly and discovered that the Xerces blue's DNA was distinct, indicating that it was a specific species.
The conclusions of the study have far-reaching consequences. "Because it is the first insect we know of in North America that people drove to extinction, the Xerces blue butterfly is the most emblematic bug for conservation. It is the name of an insect conservation society."
Moreau agrees. "It's awful that we pushed something to extinction, but at the same time, what we're saying is that what we assumed is supported by DNA evidence. If we had discovered that the Xerces blue was not truly extinct, it might have jeopardized conservation efforts."
Extinct Species
Extinct species DNA sequencing occasionally raises the possibility of resurrecting the species, à la Jurassic Park, but Grewe and Moreau argue in their study that those efforts would be better spent conserving species that currently exist. "Before we start putting a lot of work towards resurrection, let's put that energy into conserving what we already have and learning from our mistakes," Grewe adds.
Grewe claims that the initiative highlights the value of museum collections, in addition to the study's conservation implications. "Nobody thought of sequencing the DNA of this butterfly when it was collected 93 years ago. That is why we must continue to collect data for scholars in the next 100 years."
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