NANYUKI: Najin, 30, and her offspring Fatu (unseen), 19, two female northern white rhinos, the last two northern white rhinos left on the planet, graze in their secured paddock on August 23, 2019 at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Nanyuki, 147 kilometers north of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. - AFP

OL PEJETA:
Veterinarians have successfully harvested eggs from the last two surviving
northern white rhinos, taking them one step closer to bringing the species back
from the brink of extinction, scientists said in Kenya on Friday. Science is
the only hope for the northern white rhino after the death last year of the
last male, named Sudan, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya where the
groundbreaking procedure was carried out Thursday.

Two females,
Najin, 30, and daughter Fatu, 19, are the only survivors of the subspecies of
white rhino, and live under 24-hour armed guard at Ol Pejeta. However neither
is able to carry a calf. Fatu has degenerative lesions in her uterus and Najin
has weak hind legs which could cause complications if she fell pregnant.

The rhinos
underwent a highly risky procedure carried out by a team of international vets,
which saw them anaesthetised for almost two hours, and their eggs extracted
using techniques that have taken years of research and development. "It
was a great success, yesterday ten oocytes were harvested which was about the
number we hoped for" said Jan Stejskal, of the Dvur Kralove Zoo in Czech
Republic, which in 2009 sent four northern white rhinos to Kenya in a bid to
encourage them to breed.

Technique
developed from scratch

He explained that
after the discovery that the two females were infertile in 2014, over 15
European zoos had given the green light for their their southern white rhino
females to undergo the newly-developed egg extraction technique. In July 2018
the first-ever rhino embryos were created, a hybrid of southern and northern
white rhino.

The oocytes from
Najin and Fatu were airlifted to a laboratory in Italy, where they will be
fertilised with cryogenically frozen sperm -- of which there are samples from
four deceased males -- likely by the end of the week. Now scientists have to
develop a technique to transfer the embryos into a surrogate rhino. This has been
attempted in southern white rhinos but has yet to be successful. Then it is a
race against time to extract as many more eggs as possible from the living
northern white females.

The team working
on the project includes Ol Pejeta, Italian biotech laboratory Avantea, Czech
zoo Dvur Kralove, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the German-based Leibniz
Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research. "As scientists we are gaining so
much results and information about reproduction biology and assisted reproduction
that can and will help other species which are not so close to the verge of
extinction as the northern white rhino," said Frank Goritz, head
veterinarian at the Leibnitz institute. Richard Vigne, the managing director of
Ol Pejeta, said efforts to revive the dying species were crucial to
highlighting the "current crisis of extinction that we humans are
responsible for."

Wiped out by
poaching

There are five
rhino species remaining on earth, of which black and white rhinos are found in
Africa. The northern white rhino is generally considered a subspecies of white
rhino although some scientists believe it to be a sixth species. Rhinos have
few predators in the wild due to their size but have been devastated by
poaching for their horns -- used in traditional Chinese medicine. Modern rhinos
have plodded the earth for 26 million years. As recently as the mid-19th
century there were more than one million in Africa. The western black rhino was
declared extinct in 2011.

If the IVF is
successful, scientists say there may be several births of northern white rhino
calves, but the approach has its limits. Eggs can only be collected from the
females three times a year, and a lack of genetic diversity could hamper the
survival of the species. However the consortium of international scientists
known as BioRescue is also trying to create artificial sex cells known as
gametes via stem cell transformation from the frozen tissue of other, unrelated
northern white rhinos, to diversify the gene pool.

The northern
white rhino once roamed Uganda, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Chad.
It is hoped a revived population -- which could take up to 70 years -- could
eventually be re-introduced into secure habitats in these areas. "They
lived in an area which really is not that safe right now, but there are some
parts of their former range where they could be released," said Stejskal,
adding there was hope for some conflict-torn nations to eventually provide a
secure habitat in decades to come. - AFP