Hope for a species on the brink
TRANSPLANTED
THE TWO LONELIEST RHINOS IN THE WORLD are the female known as Najin and her daughter, known as Fatu. They live in the Ol Pejeta wildlife conservancy in Kenya and are the world’s last remaining northern white rhinos. But Najin and Fatu may soon have company.
As the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin announced on Jan. 24, a team of researchers led by Bio-Rescue, an international consortium of scientists and conservationists, has for the first time succeeded in transplanting a rhinoceros embryo fertilized in the lab into the womb of an adult female. If the methods the researchers used bear out, the northern white rhino could have a second chance at life.
“The embryo transfer technique is well established for humans and domesticated animals such as horses and cows,” says Thomas Hildebrandt, head of BioRescue, in a statement. “But for rhinos it has been completely uncharted territory. It took many years to get it right and we are overwhelmed that this technique worked perfectly.”
Northern white rhino embryos do exist in labs, but they are a rare commodity. Since 2019, BioRescue has produced just 30 of them, made of Fatu’s harvested eggs and the preserved sperm of four deceased males. That’s too precious a store to risk squandering even one on an experiment that might not succeed. Instead, the scientists worked with t
