First in History, IVF Breakthrough Could Revive Nearly Extinct Rhino
- VIVA.co.id/Arianti Widya
But returning the species to the wild is no easy task. The last male northern white rhino died in 2018, and neither of the remaining females are capable of carrying pregnancies. Still, preserving the rhinos has rallied international support.
Through IVF, BioRescue hopes to take a lab-grown northern white rhino embryo and implant it into a southern white rhino, which will carry the fetus and help repopulate the critically endangered species.
The organization’s recent IVF success was the first phase of this process and an effort that spanned years and borders.
The team retrieved sperm from a southern white rhino in Austria, collected egg cells from a southern white rhino in Belgium, fertilized the samples in vitro in Italy and finally transferred the two embryos to the surrogate mother in Kenya.
It took 13 attempts to achieve a sustained pregnancy through IVF.
“It’s very challenging in such a big animal, in terms of placing an embryo inside the reproductive tract, which is almost two meters inside the animal,” Holtze stated.
The challenges don’t stop there. As BioRescue turns its attention to transferring a northern white rhino embryo into a surrogate mother, they will have limited attempts to reach success.
Only 30 of these embryos exist, harvested from the eggs of one of the remaining females and the preserved sperm of the now-deceased male.
Now, the team is racing against time, as scientists hope that any new northern white rhino calves can live among the remainder of their kind, meaning “they need to be born before the two remaining females die,”the National Geographic wrote.
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