Recently, the team successfully implanted two embryos into a surrogate rhino and are awaiting confirmation that implantation resulted in a pregnancy. We’ve also produced southern white rhino embryos which we’re using to test how we can perform embryo transfer,” Seet said.īecause the northern white rhino embryos are so rare, the first test cases are using southern white rhino embryos. Right now, we have fourteen, they’re stored in liquid nitrogen. We use an incubator and then produce an embryo. They need the right temperature and conditions. “We have to let the embryos mature outside the body. To date, the team has successfully created 14 northern white rhino embryos utilizing Fatu’s eggs and the preserved sperm of four deceased males. Instead, the team decided they would harvest eggs, also known as oocytes, from Najin and Fatu in hopes of creating embryos which could be implanted in southern white rhino surrogates.
Moreover, impregnating one or both of the remaining females necessarily locks up their biology for the duration of gestation, a period of 16 to 18 months. An ethical risk assessment suggested she may not be able to successfully carry a rhino calf to term. Najin is Fatu’s mother and is past her reproductive prime. But it isn’t as simple as implanting the two remaining females with the preserved sperm. There aren’t any living males, but their biological information still exists and could be reintroduced to the population. That’s when BioRescue realized they had sperm cells from northern white rhinos preserved in their tissue collection. Once the last of the male northern white rhinos died, the question of whether or not the species could recover on its own was settled. There are so many challenges and statistically a species will be wiped out,” Seet said. You have diseases and internal conflicts, you have catastrophes. “In our experience, if a population has less than 50 individuals, it will die out. Seet believes that in some instances meddling is exactly what needs to happen. It turns out, year by year, more species are going down the road to extinction and those databases are becoming more and more important,” Seet told SYFY WIRE.Ĭonservation efforts often focus on reducing human interference and preserving natural habitats, in order to allow a species to save themselves without our meddling in their affairs. The idea was maybe we could use the material in the future. “In the very early days our institute started to collect samples from different species and store them in liquid nitrogen. Steven Seet, a member of BioRescue’s project management and Head of Science Communication, spoke with SYFY WIRE about their efforts to save the species through assisted reproduction, utilizing preserved tissues from living and deceased white rhinos. That’s where BioRescue, an international consortium of scientists and conservationists, comes in.
If things were allowed to follow their course, this subspecies of rhinoceros would vanish from the face of the Earth with the death of this last generation. Both of those individuals - named Fatu and Najin - are female, meaning there’s no chance of natural reproduction. That has been the case with the northern white rhino, a lumbering giant whose numbers have fallen so drastically that the species is functionally extinct in the wild.Īt present, there are only two northern white rhinos left. Sometimes, however, a beloved species of animal declines in numbers and we take notice. The results of that extinction are unfolding all around us, often without our having realized until it’s too late, if we even notice at all. Some scientists believe that we are currently in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event.
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