The third-to-last male northern white rhinoceros on Earth was in his late 20s — middle-aged by rhino
By Tim McDonnell
Mr. McDonnell is a reporter covering global climate change and energy issues, based in Cairo, Egypt.
- Sept. 16, 2022
The third-to-last male northern white rhinoceros on Earth was in his late 20s — middle-aged by rhino standards — when a team of scientists carefully anesthetized him, inserted a probe into his rectum, and administered a mild electric shock to nerves near the prostate, causing the rhino to ejaculate in his sleep. The sperm was then separated out and frozen.
That rhino — named Suni — grew old and eventually died. So did the other remaining males.
Today, the only surviving members of the species are two females — Najin, and Fatu. In the wild, that would mean the species would, inevitably, go extinct.
But Thomas Hildebrant, a senior biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and a pioneer of assisted reproduction in large mammals, has a different idea.
Mr. Hildebrant, who led the team that collected Suni’s sperm, plans to use it (and that of another of the last males) to perform a miracle: bringing a species back from the brink of extinction when one sex is already gone.
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To do this, he would use the sperm to fertilize an egg collected from one of the remaining females, which would be implanted in a surrogate mother of a different kind of rhino (Najin and Fatu both have problems with their uteruses and can’t carry offspring).
After spending a few years carefully crafting a stockpile of embryos, Mr. Hildebrant now feels that he has enough to try for a pregnancy by the end of this year. Rhino pregnancies last 16 months. So by spring 2024, Najin and Fatu could be a little less lonely. The plan to rescue the northern white rhino is unique, but its existential predicament is not.
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Between poaching, the bulldozing of natural habitats for farms or shopping malls, and the mounting pressure of climate change, up to one million species are currently at risk of extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations report. We are living through one of only half a dozen periods in Earth’s history with such a devastating rate of species loss, even without the help of an asteroid or mega-volcano.
But this time, we do have the help of science. And as threats to biodiversity escalate, and more and more species face extinction, scientists are responding with ever more creative, hands-on and potentially risky interventions to try to save them.
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They are — as with Suni — cryogenically banking reproductive cells collected via electroejaculation and using them to perform assisted pregnancies. They are physically relocating animals to safer habitats by truck and airplane. They are transporting animals over special bridges, shooting them through cannons and dangling them upside-down from helicopters.
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