![]() Originally applied on domestic and lab animals, assisted reproduction technologies (ARTs) have also found application in conservation breeding programs, where they can make the genetic management of populations more efficient, and increase the number of individuals per generation. 8Kenya Wildlife Service, Nairobi, Kenya.7Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservancy, Nanyuki, Kenya.6ZOO Dvůr Králové, Dvůr Králové nad Labem, Czechia.5Department of Comparative Biomedicine and Food Science, University of Padua, Legnaro, Italy.4Avantea, Laboratory of Reproductive Technologies, Cremona, Italy.3Department of Veterinary Medicine, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany.2Ethics Laboratory for Veterinary Medicine, Conservation, and Animal Welfare, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.1Department of Reproduction Management, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Germany.Hildebrandt 1,3 * Frank Göritz 1 Robert Hermes 1 Susanne Holtze 1 Cesare Galli 4 Giovanna Lazzari 4 Silvia Colleoni 4 Ilaria Pollastri 2,5 Maria Michela Spiriti 2,5 Jan Stejskal 6 Steven Seet 1 Jan Zwilling 1 Stephen Ngulu 7 Samuel Mutisya 7 Linus Kariuki 8 Isaac Lokolool 8 Patrick Omondo 8 David Ndeereh 8 Barbara de Mori 2,5 As follicles grow and some are selected for ovulation, many are lost.Pierfrancesco Biasetti 1,2 * Thomas B. Ovaries contain lots of these immature follicles that are just waiting to be activated – in fact, far more follicles than are actually needed. At this point, these contain fluid and secrete hormones which influence the menstrual cycle. The follicle grows over months until it’s ready to ovulate. At the centre of each of these sits an immature egg, also known as an oocyte. So what if we had the means to produce more eggs? While eggs collected from female rhinos are in short supply, generating eggs from ovarian tissue from deceased rhinos could fill the gap.Ĭoral sex: how reproducing species in the lab could be key to restoring reefs in the wildĪs in humans, every female rhinoceros is born with thousands, if not millions, of immature ovarian follicles. As you might imagine, with only two remaining rhinos to gather these precious eggs from, this limits our ability to revive entire populations. After transfer to a surrogate, only some will complete their development and become baby rhinos. Not all of these eggs will fertilise and not all will develop into an embryo. ![]() ![]() Transferring embryos into surrogates to produce baby animals is a process that’s been well established for lots of species, including horses and cows, though it’s still in the development phase for rhinos.īut the biggest constraint on this approach is that hormonal stimulation of female rhinos produces just a few eggs per cycle. ![]() They’re frozen and awaiting implantation in a surrogate female southern white rhinoceros. To date, a handful of northern white rhinoceros embryos have been created this way. After treating the females with hormones the immature eggs were collected, transferred to a lab where they were matured and then fertilised with frozen sperm. The first breakthroughsĪ team led by Professor Thomas Hildebrandt from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany had a breakthrough in 2019 when they managed to collect eggs from the last remaining northern white rhinoceros females. By using ovary tissue from deceased female rhinos to grow lots of eggs for fertilisation in a lab, we think we may have found a way to save the northern white rhinoceros – and potentially, other endangered species – from extinction. We established the Rhino Fertility Project at the University of Oxford to help solve this problem. Sperm samples from deceased males that are preserved in bio-banks solve one side of the equation, but there aren’t frozen stores of northern white rhino eggs that we can rely on as easily. New techniques, such as in vitro fertilisation (commonly known as IVF), enable us to bypass normal reproduction to produce new northern white rhino babies. This is a poignant, but not entirely hopeless, situation. Historical distributions of the northern (red) and southern (green) white rhino.
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