Hope for Northern White rhino after successful artificial insemination

Female Northern White Rhinoa Fatu (left) with her mother Najin grazing on March 31,2018.The Memorial service of Sudan the last Male Northern White Rhino took place at Rhino cemetery within Ol Pejeta conservancy in Laikipia County. [Kipsang Joseph/Standard]

?Hopes for saving the northern white rhino from extinction have been renewed after scientists confirmed they have successfully impregnated a surrogate southern white rhino through artificial insemination.

If the pregnancy is successful, the first northern white rhino conceived through artificial insemination will be born in May next year.

This news has been greeted with enthusiasm among conservationists across the world, including the Ol Pejeta Conservancy which hosts the only two surviving northern white rhinos in the world.

“The confirmation of this pregnancy through artificial insemination represents a historic event for our organisation but also a critical step in our effort to save the northern white rhino,” the organisation said in a statement.

Najin, 17, and Fatu, 27, who are the only Northern White rhinos left, are both female but too old to sustain a pregnancy. Previous efforts to impregnate them have failed, forcing scientists to harvest their eggs, which they hope will be fertilised artificially with sperm harvested from the male northern white rhino that became extinct two months ago.

A team of scientists from the San Diego Institute of Conservation Research in the US have announced the breakthrough just two months after Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, died from complications related to old age in Kenya.

Should the pregnancy survive, it would give scientists the hope of repeating artificial insemination using genetic material harvested from male northern white rhinos.

The ultimate goal, which is a long shot, is to create a herd of 15 northern white rhinos and eventually return them to their natural habitat in Africa.

“The pregnancy, created through artificial insemination with sperm from a male southern white rhino, is an important milestone in the ongoing work to develop the scientific knowledge required to genetically recover the northern white rhino, a distant subspecies of the southern white rhino,” said Randy Rieches, Director of Curatorial and Husbandry Sciences for San Diego Zoo Global.

“Just the fact that we have been able to confirm this pregnancy while the embryo is just a few weeks old is tremendously important and is all due to the work that animal care staff have put into developing relationships with these rhinos.”

At the Ol Pejeta, scientists are still working out on how to carry out a similar procedure using sperms harvested from Sudan when he was still alive. The plan is to fertilise them externally with eggs harvested from Najin and Fatu then plant them in a female southern White rhino at the conservancy.  

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