northern white rhinoceros vs southern white rhinoseros

From there they boarded a commercial flight to Frankfurt, where they switched to another plane destined for Italy.Īt Galli’s lab in Cremona, the team will now wait to see which egg cells mature and fertilize them with frozen northern white rhino semen. The scientists carefully packed the eggs into blocky white coolers and quickly carried them onto a waiting helicopter, which ferried them to the airport in Nairobi. “Now it’s finally happening.”īut the team did not have much time to revel in their achievement. “I was here five years ago when we found out Fatu and Najin would not be able to reproduce naturally, and we realized we’d need to pursue artificial means,” rememberers Jan Stejskal, director of international projects at the Dvůr Králové Zoo. After years of research, preparation, and practice, this is a critical first step in the quest to breed new members of this critically endangered subspecies. Today, the team announced it has made significant progress towards that goal: On August 22, the team successfully retrieved eggs from Fatu and Najin-a feat that had not previously been attempted on northern white rhinos. ( Also read about the urgent effort to save the Sumatran rhino.) The group devised a scheme to regenerate the northern white rhino population through in vitro fertilization, a process in which egg and sperm are fertilized outside the body. Back in 2014, after learning that Fatu and Najin were likely infertile, he organized an international team that included the Dvůr Králové Zoo, the Kenya Wildlife Service, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, and Avantea, an Italian animal reproduction lab. For years, Thomas Hildebrandt, head of reproduction management at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, and his team had been collecting and freezing semen from several northern white rhino bulls-including Sudan. While the deaths were devastating, scientists were prepared. Since then Fatu and Najin have been the only representatives of their kind. She was followed by Suni, one of the males at Ol Pejeta, Angalifu, Nabire, Nola, and finally, in the spring of 2018, Sudan, the last male northern white rhino on Earth. In 2011, Nesari, an elderly female, died at Dvůr Králové.

Meanwhile, the few relatives they had begun to pass away. Though the rhinos’ keepers witnessed several mating attempts, Fatu and Najin remained barren and were eventually deemed incapable of bearing calves. The change of scenery did less than the conservationists had hoped. Conservationists hoped that transporting those four to Ol Pejeta in their native Africa, with its warmer climate and expansive grasslands, would inspire them to breed and allow the subspecies to recover. Only four of them were potentially fertile. Twenty five years later, in 2009, just eight northern white rhinos remained-all of them housed either at Dvůr Králové in the Czech Republic or the San Diego Zoo. There, they were scooped up in DHL trucks and driven to Ol Pejeta, a wildlife conservancy nearly three times the size of San Francisco in the country’s center. Accompanied by a veterinarian and packed in special wooden crates built to support their heft-they typically weigh between 3,750 pounds and 5,290 pounds-the rhinos flew to Kenya. On a frigid day in December 2009, four northern white rhinos were picked up from the Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic and transported to the airport in Prague, where they were loaded onto a Martinair 747 cargo jet as snow swirled outside.

The embryos are being stored in liquid nitrogen, with conservationists planning to implant them in a southern white rhino surrogate in the future. The first two embryos were created in September, and the third was created in December, following a second egg-extraction procedure, according to Ol Pejeta.

Update, January 19, 2019: Scientists have successfully created three embryos using eggs extracted from a living northern white rhino and the preserved sperm of deceased northern white rhinos.

Northern white rhinoceros vs southern white rhinoseros