Najin is unable to donate eggs due to an ovarian tumour, leaving 22-year-old Fatu as the only available donor.įatu undergoes the procedure roughly once every three months, using an ultrasound-guided needle to puncture her rectal passage and aspirate the immature eggs, known as oocytes. Hildebrandt developed a method to harvest them, but by the time it was perfected, the only female northern white rhinos remaining were Najin and Fatu. IVF involves the fusion of egg and sperm in a dish to create a ‘test tube embryo’, but rhino eggs are not easy to come by. This was used to artificially inseminate Najin and Fatu, but when the females failed to become pregnant, the team turned to in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Hildebrandt has developed a procedure to stimulate the prostate gland of northern white rhinos, using semen samples stored away from four of the last male rhinos. Sudan is one of a number of northern white rhinos who may still be able to produce offspring from beyond the grave, so Hildebrandt and colleagues started to collect and freeze their semen. Conservationists hoped that the small number of animals left in captivity would be able to kickstart the population, but the rhinos didn’t get the memo. The last northern white rhino, Sudan, died in 2018. Northern white rhinos were a common sight on the savannahs of eastern and central Africa at the turn of the 20th century, but poaching, habitat destruction, and armed conflict led to a population collapse. The biggest challenge, however, might not be raising new rhinos rather, it might be quieting those who think the project should never have been undertaken in the first place. Thomas Hildebrandt of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research. We have hope, says project director and veterinarian Prof. If all goes according to plan, the pitter-patter of not-so-tiny rhino feet could be just a few years away. The BioRescue project involves cutting-edge veterinary science, cell biology and the creation of ‘test tube rhinos’. The northern white rhino is functionally extinct, but an international group of scientists have been working to bring it back from the brink.
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