Oh wow. I’m a fan of Conservation X Labs from the biodiversity side! I only know them from their conservation work, and have a positive opinion of their priorities from what I’ve been able to glean.
Fertility control is one of the 20 areas I looked into for EcoResilience Initiative while investigating techniques for enhancing biodiversity, as opposed to wild animal welfare impact. I don’t expect it to be the top biodiversity intervention (mostly because I’m not sure how well it will scale). But I would still say it definitely has the potential to be highly impactful. Rodent contraceptive is one of the top fertility control targets. Australia, New Zealand, and island conservation organizations are serious about rodent fertility control for their conservation programs. It is probably being held back by concerns about negative reception than technical feasibility. A lot of conservation decisions are driven by a fear of doing a small amount of damage, overly prioritizing delay despite the large amount of damage that could be potentially prevented. Perhaps I should also mention that immunocontraception doesn’t have to be super scalable to be a huge improvement over current methods. Its pretty crazy what lengths conservation programs have gone to to eradicate invasive species off of islands.
There is also the potential for similar hormonal fertility control to be rapidly developed in other highly damaging invasive mammals like feral pigs, horses, deer, and goats if it performs well in field trials with rats.
Seeing Conservation X Labs mentioned on the EA forum raises my opinion of them even more! They are tackling biodiversity by developing linchpin technologies, and really look for scalable impact.
Oh wow. I’m a fan of Conservation X Labs from the biodiversity side! I only know them from their conservation work, and have a positive opinion of their priorities from what I’ve been able to glean.
Fertility control is one of the 20 areas I looked into for EcoResilience Initiative while investigating techniques for enhancing biodiversity, as opposed to wild animal welfare impact. I don’t expect it to be the top biodiversity intervention (mostly because I’m not sure how well it will scale). But I would still say it definitely has the potential to be highly impactful. Rodent contraceptive is one of the top fertility control targets. Australia, New Zealand, and island conservation organizations are serious about rodent fertility control for their conservation programs. It is probably being held back by concerns about negative reception than technical feasibility. A lot of conservation decisions are driven by a fear of doing a small amount of damage, overly prioritizing delay despite the large amount of damage that could be potentially prevented. Perhaps I should also mention that immunocontraception doesn’t have to be super scalable to be a huge improvement over current methods. Its pretty crazy what lengths conservation programs have gone to to eradicate invasive species off of islands.
There is also the potential for similar hormonal fertility control to be rapidly developed in other highly damaging invasive mammals like feral pigs, horses, deer, and goats if it performs well in field trials with rats.
Seeing Conservation X Labs mentioned on the EA forum raises my opinion of them even more! They are tackling biodiversity by developing linchpin technologies, and really look for scalable impact.