http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116329/ That's what I thought when I heard about the cranes.

I believe that he just got in the air again recently. It was because he wasn't flying the plane for money, and therefore didn't have the right type of permit. The cranes stayed in Georgia for a few extra days, haha.

So I found out... it did remind me of the movie though!

I love reddit.

Actually, this initiative has been wildly successful. Statistically, inbreeding will result in deleterious alleles only a fraction of the time. There were 12 birds in 1940 (that traveled all in one flock and could have been wiped out by any natural disaster). Now there are around 300 in the same flock (source : http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/crane/AboutSpring.html)

Except this is not natural selection. I'd say that most of the species that have gone extinct in the last few thousand years were a direct or indirect result of humans' interaction with the environment (we are in fact in the midst of the 6th mass extinction - out of the last 4.5 billion years). They started disappearing because of humans over-hunting them and draining their habitat. Yes - 99.9% of the species that have lived on earth have gone extinct. We can't save every organism that's poorly suited for their environment from extinction. However, the cause of the whooping crane's population decline is not their poor fitness, but rather our recklessness. We have an obligation to fix that.

Sorry, should have said a meeting of deleterious alleles. I'm a microbiologist, not an evolutionist :P

We are, of course, a part of the ecosystem, which is a complex and often ambiguous web of interactions. We have no idea of the consequences of wiping out even a single species. I disagree with you that the eradication of millions of species should be looked at as such a benign thing. We are intelligent organisms. We should know that conserving our habitat (and therefore every part of it) is wildly advantageous to our survival. It's beneficial to our own species to not dessimate our world. Therefore, I would argue that the current path of destruction we're taking is not natural at all. Humans are the only species on earth that actively destroys our habitat. And as this post has just pointed out, even if we are the cause of a species endangerement, we can stop them from going extinct.

my god... TIL Jenny McCarthy is a whooping crane.