Africa-Press – Kenya. Najin and Fatu are the last two Northern white rhinos on the planet.
They are both female and both incapable of carrying a pregnancy. The last male died in 2018.
It doesn’t get more critical than this.
Conservationists here at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya and their colleagues around the world are in a race against time to create a successful pregnancy using eggs harvested from Najin and Fatu and sperm collected from male northern white rhinos before they died.
18 eggs that were collected from Fatu, resulted in the creation of five new embryos in a lab in Cremona, Italy in May.
So far 29 northern white rhino embryos have been created explains Samuel Mutisya, is Head of Research and Species Conservation at Ol Pejeta Conservancy.
The embryos are stored in liquid nitrogen to be transferred into a surrogate mother — a southern white rhino — in the coming months or years.
The project is a collaboration involving a team of scientists and conservationists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Safari Park Dvůr Králové, Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and Wildlife Research and Training Institute (WRTI) at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, collectively known as the BioRescue team.
Potential surrogate mothers have been identified says Mutisya adding that Southern white rhino females have been selected for their similarity to Northern white rhinos.
The Biorescue team will next perform embryo transfers with Southern white rhino embryos to check that their methods will result in a viable pregnancy, before applying the same approach to Northern white rhino embryos.
Jacob Anampio, a rhino keeper at Ol Pejeta Conservancy says he is honoured to care for these precious creatures.
Decades of poaching have taken a heavy toll on rhino species.
The animals are killed for their horns, which have long been used as carving material and prized in traditional Chinese medicine for their supposed healing properties.
The last male northern white rhino was a 45-year-old named Sudan, who gained fame in 2017 when he was listed as “The Most Eligible Bachelor in the World” on the Tinder dating app as part of a fundraising effort. Sudan, named for the country where he was born in the wild, was euthanized in 2018 because of age-related ills.
says Mutisya.
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