What if the Dodo bird was still alive in modern day?

I have a short story in a collection of 'oddball fiction' that has surviving dodos... sorta. The narrator of the story runs across a woman who recognized a painting of a dodo he was perusing, mentions her family had had them on her farm (in the USA) when she was a girl. After some investigation, the narrator finds that the woman's distant ancestor had visited Mauritius and thought that dodos were neat for some reason, and brought some birds and eggs to America. His descendants continued to raise them after he died, keeping it a family tradition. As the narrator tracked down the story, he found the abandoned farm and piles of dodo skeletons and egg shells. At the end, in a bizarre twist, one of the last ancestors years before had been appointed to some business position in Mauritius... and he sold the farm and butchered all the dodos for one last grand feast...
Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop.
 
How did they taste? Dropping a few on islands across the Indian Ocean as a way to grab an easy meal might work, given we literally hunted them to extinction.

As I understand, the problem was more due to invasive species like pigs and rats eating its eggs (which it did not bury) and food supply.
 
Hi everyone. Sorry but I don't understand what would change if Dodo was still alive? Is it an important bird or what? It doesn't look beautiful for me so I wouldn't domesticate it like pet or so:)
 
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Hi everyone. Sorry but I don't understand what would change if Dodo was still alive? Is it an important bird or what? It doesn't look beautiful for me so I wouldn't domesticate it like pet or so.
Welcome to the site!

To answer your question, nothing changes that much, but I just like the idea of preventing extinctions
 
Specifics? Was it gamey, or chewy? So juicy it loterally dribbles down your chin with each bite? I have jeard that about wallabee.

While I got no specifics and descriptions do vary (although those might be due to a different cooking method) there were sailors who had been on ship rations for several months, desperate to finally eat something else - but then didn't like the taste of Dodo meat.
 
While I got no specifics and descriptions do vary (although those might be due to a different cooking method) there were sailors who had been on ship rations for several months, desperate to finally eat something else - but then didn't like the taste of Dodo meat.

That's a damn shame. I bet if they spiced the meat up nice and fried the dodos, they would've been delicious. Think of the culinary possibilities. Make sure they eat nothing but fruit so they get fat and tasty, marinate them in wine or beer, and then slow roast them. Mmm, I want dodo meat now. How does ostrich, cassowary or Rhea taste?
 
I wouldn't expect much to change tbh. Chances are dodos probably would be a delicacy among Mauritius people regardless of their taste, farmed for their meat and eggs (Whether it'd be domesticated or farmed the same way ostriches are I don't know), featured in gardens like peacocks and given their own natural reserves. Due to these factors alone I doubt it'd be endangered.

Also as some mentioned it'd be seen as the national symbol of Mauritius the same way the Kiwi is of New Zealand.
 
How does ostrich taste?

Okay. Once it's cooked, if you don't know what you're eating, it's reasonably indistinguishable from say, beef. Its not bad, actually, in fact, a lot of doctors recommend it ahead of a few other forms of meat because it has less fat on it, apparently.

I'm not sure about the eating possibilities. If sailors, who have been living on salt-beef or salt-pork on a several month-long trip out of London/Amsterdam (not sure how long they'd be aboard, I think my grade school teacher said it was six-eight months from London to Cape Town, but can't recall if that was one way or round trip), couldn't stomach it - and sailors in those days would eat just about anything if starving, apparently. What hope do us landlubbers have of it? Yeah, sure the ship's cook or slushy (cook's mate) was usually no more qualified than the sawbones (the surgeon), but still, not sure that it could be doctored to make it taste better. Unless it was one of those things where the dodo's diet was responsible for why the meat tasted so foul. Like with bear meat where if a bear's eaten other animals it tastes different/worse to a bear that's lived off of fruit/berries/honey (again, apparently)
 
Well, we will probably could answer this question in the future, as if cloning technologies progress well, sooner or later somebody would clone one back to life, at least as a scientific curiosity.

Cloning birds has the advantage that you don't need a very specific host like in the mammals case, whatever big pigeon might serve as host. And scientists have obtained fresh DNA from subfossil dodos and already sequenced it, so there is also not the problem of availability of fresh DNA unlike the famous case of cloning dinosaurs.

The main problem, as in many other cloning attempts, is surviving the early embryo stages.
 
The other issue lies in that conventional (somatic cell nuclear transfer) cloning of birds is not possible as we know it - that requires single-cell eggs/zygotes (for inserting a nucleus for your desired clone) and a uterus (into which the single zygote, once activated, can implant and develop into an embryo), which in birds is instead replaced with the egg tract and individual yolks for unfertilized eggs. Constructing an artificial egg and culturing an early-stage embryo in that is also not feasible yet (or transfer of an embryo into an egg, due to the precision and tiny scales of connections in those things), though could theoretically be done in the far future.

It is possible, however, to culture an early-stage bird embryo in vitro, then harvest the germ cells that would develop into its reproductive system and insert those into a bird embryo within a recently-laid egg of the right developmental stage. If the transplantee embryo survives to hatch, it will act like a normal member of its species, but have reproductive organs that correspond to the species of the cultured embryo they were harvested from - which will produce gametes that also correspond to that species (it will look like one species, but if bred with other chimeras will produce offspring of the other species). This has been successfully done before to breed houbara bustards (endangered ground birds which have a very specific reproductive cycle and have thus far not been able to be captive-bred) using chickens as a proxy species, and there are plans by a private organization to use this method to resurrect the passenger pigeon using the closely-related band-tailed pigeon as a proxy.

There is no reason that this method would not work on dodos if one could assemble a composite genome from the remains we have, though the technology is far more theoretical than cloning and there aren't really any living birds that could foster the chicks (or for that matter, existing knowledge as to how to raise them - incubation time and specifics, what to feed chicks, etc.) So possible, but hard and demanding a lot of trial and error.

As for the dodos, JonasResende has summed up about all what I would have to say - it seems that there were some sailors that found it edible, but that is not really praise to be proud of for any sort of food.
 
This has been successfully done before to breed houbara bustards (endangered ground birds which have a very specific reproductive cycle and have thus far not been able to be captive-bred) using chickens as a proxy species, and there are plans by a private organization to use this method to resurrect the passenger pigeon using the closely-related band-tailed pigeon as a proxy.

There is no reason that this method would not work on dodos if one could assemble a composite genome from the remains we have, though the technology is far more theoretical than cloning and there aren't really any living birds that could foster the chicks (or for that matter, existing knowledge as to how to raise them - incubation time and specifics, what to feed chicks, etc.) So possible, but hard and demanding a lot of trial and error.

Isn't a bit useless to spend such efforts in recovering a species such as the passenger pigeon? They would need to clone large flocks if they want the bird to be something functional again, and not just a curiosity in a zoo.

Fostering dodos could be done by species with similar ecological roles like the weka.
 
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