An international consortium of scientists and conservationists completed a procedure that gets the world one step closer to saving the northern white rhinos.
The team successfully harvested ten eggs – five from Najin and five from Fatu, the two females who live in Ol Pejeta Conservancy — a procedure that has never been attempted in northern white rhinos before.
Only two, Najin and Fatu remain, both on Ol Pejeta Conservancy. They are the last two northern white rhinos in the world, both of them female.
“Sadly, neither of them are able to carry a pregnancy, but a groundbreaking procedure carried out yesterday means they still have the chance to mother the next generation of northern white rhinos, and that there is very real hope for the future of this species,” Ol Pejeta Conservancy located in northern Kenya said in a statement issued in Nairobi on Friday.
The northern white rhino is a subspecies of white rhino, which used to range over parts of Uganda, Chad, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Years of widespread poaching and civil war in their home range have devastated northern white rhino populations, and they are now considered to be extinct in the wild.
This was a joint effort by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) Berlin, Avantea, Dvůr Králové Zoo, and Ol Pejeta Conservancy.
After the eggs were harvested, they were flown to Avantea Laboratory in Italy where they will be fertilized with frozen sperm from Suni and Saut, two male northern white rhinos, and in the near future the embryo will be transferred to a southern white rhino surrogate mother.
The procedure to harvest eggs from the females was conducted with a probe, guided by ultrasound, which harvested immature egg cells (oocytes) from the ovaries of the animals who were under general anaesthetic.
“The anaesthesia went smoothly without any complications although these animals had not been immobilized for the last five years,” added the conservancy.
Najin and Fatu responded well to the procedure and are back to their normal selves.
In March 2018, the world’s last standing male northern white rhino, died aged 45.
JK/as/APA