In a major development to save endangered species, the first in vitro fertilization of a rhinoceros has been achieved.

This fact now gives hope for saving the northern white rhinoceros from extinction as there are only two of these animals on the planet.

Notably, scientists have achieved the world’s first IVF rhinoceros pregnancy by successfully transferring a lab-created rhinoceros embryo to a surrogate mother.

The procedure was performed with southern white rhinos, a closely related subspecies of northern whites.

The next step is to repeat the process with northern white rhino embryos.

“Achieving the first successful embryo transfer in a rhinoceros is a huge step,” said Susanne Holtze, a scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, which is part of the Biorescue project, an international consortium trying to save this kind.

“But now I think with this achievement, we are very confident that we will be able to breed northern white rhinos in the same way and that we will be able to save the species.”

Northern white rhinos once existed throughout central Africa, but illegal poaching, fueled by demand for rhino horn, decimated the wild population.

Now there are only two rhinos left: two females, Najin and her daughter Fatu. Both are kept under strict security at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

Unable to reproduce, the species is technically extinct. But now the Biorescue team has turned to fertility science to save the species.

The procedure was first applied to southern white rhinos. They are a close cousin of the northern whites and number in the thousands although still threatened by poaching.

The IVF effort took years and had to overcome many challenges: from working out how to collect eggs from the two-ton animals, creating the first rhino embryos in a lab, and trying to determine how – and when – they should be implanted. .

It took 13 attempts to achieve the first viable pregnancy. “It’s very difficult in such a large animal, in terms of placing an embryo inside the reproductive tract, which is almost 2 meters inside the animal,” Susanne Holtze told BBC News.

The embryo, which was created using an egg from a female white from a zoo in Belgium and fertilized with sperm from a male in Austria, was transferred to a female southern white rhino, as a surrogate mother in Kenya, who became pregnant.

However, success was followed by tragedy. Seventy days into the pregnancy, the surrogate mother died after becoming infected with a bacteria found in the soil that can be fatal to animals.

The autopsy revealed that the 6.5cm male fetus was developing well and had a 95% chance of being born alive, demonstrating that the technique had worked and that a viable pregnancy through rhino IVF was possible.

Now the next step is to test it using northern white rhino embryos.
There are only 30 of these precious embryos stored in liquid nitrogen in Germany and Italy.

They were created using eggs collected from Fatu, the youngest female in Kenya, and sperm collected from two male northern white rhinos before they died.