Scientists have successfully transferred a laboratory-created rhino embryo to a surrogate mother, resulting in the world’s first “in vitro fertilization” rhino pregnancy.
The procedure was carried out with southern white rhinos, a subspecies of northern white rhinos.
The next step in the study is to repeat this with northern white rhino embryos.
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There are only two left
Northern white rhinos were once found in Central Africa, but illegal hunting, fueled by demand for rhino horn, has decimated the animals’ presence in the wild.
Only two rhinos remain in the wild: two females, Najin and his daughter Fatu.
Both animals have lived their entire lives in zoos and are kept under tight security at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.
Technically extinct
The species, which cannot reproduce, is technically extinct.
But now scientists have turned to fertility studies to bring these animals back from the brink of extinction.
They started their work using white rhinos in the south.
This close cousin of northern whites has a population in the thousands and is still threatened by illegal hunting, but is successfully protected.
13 IVF attempts
The project took years to develop and had to overcome many challenges, from researching how to collect eggs from two-ton animals, to creating the first rhino embryos in the lab and determining how and when to transplant them.
There have been 13 attempts to achieve the first IVF pregnancy using southern white rhinos.
In such a large animal, it is quite a challenge to insert the embryo into the reproductive canal, which is almost 2 meters inside the animal.
Sudden death of the surrogate mother
Using the egg of a southern white female from a zoo in Belgium and fertilized with sperm from a man in Austria, the embryo was transferred to a surrogate mother in Kenya and a pregnancy was established.
But success was followed by tragedy.
On the 70th day of pregnancy, the surrogate mother died after contracting “Clostridia”, a bacteria found in soil that can be fatal to animals.
95 percent chance of being born alive
This sudden death has once again saddened the team. The autopsy revealed that the 6.5-centimeter male fetus was well developed and had a 95% chance of being born alive.
But it showed that the technique works and that a successful pregnancy through IVF is possible. Now the next step is to try it using northern white rhino embryos.
There are only 30 of these precious embryos stored in liquid nitrogen in Germany and Italy.
These embryos were created using eggs collected from Fatu, Kenya’s youngest female, and sperm collected from two male northern white rhinos before they died.
But the birth of the northern white rhino will require another scientific first.
Neither of the last two northern white survivors can get pregnant due to age and health problems.
Instead, the embryo will be placed in the uterus of a southern white rhino as a surrogate mother.
A subtype of IVF has never been tried before, but the team is confident it will work.
SOURCE TRT News
