By some measures, the northern white rhinos are already extinct. With the four left on the planet being either too old or too sick to breed, their fate looks much the same as the dinosaurs — unless scientists can save them.
Experts in Germany, Italy and the US are developing techniques “on the edge of available science”, including cloning, stem cells and in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to keep the species alive.
“It has huge echoes of Jurassic Park,” said Richard Vigne, head of the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya, where three of the four northern white rhinos live under 24-hour armed guard to protect them from poachers.
Just like the 1993 film, in which scientists cloned dinosaurs from fossilised DNA, fertility experts hope to save the northern white rhinos by either cloning them — like Dolly the sheep in 1996 — or by manufacturing embryos in a lab from stem cells.
They are also exploring more traditional IVF techniques, which involve harvesting eggs from the last remaining females. With only three females left “it is nearly impossible”, according to Thomas Hildebrandt, a wildlife fertility vet from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.
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“Human IVF has been developed over 30 years and it is still a challenge for the parents to achieve a baby,” he said. “We are dealing with patients which weigh two tonnes and none of the protocols are fully established.”
Once the vets produce a viable embryo it would have to be implanted in a surrogate mother, from the northern white rhino’s southern cousins.
“If we have the resources we will have the first northern white rhino calf in four years,” Professor Hildebrandt added. “But at the current level, with limited funding it might take ten or 15 years.” By then, the last northern white rhinos may have died.
Sudan, the last remaining male, is 44 years old and producing poor quality sperm. Najin, a 26-year-old female who lives with him on Ol Pejeta, cannot mate because of her weak hind legs, while her daughter Fatu, 15, is infertile. Nola, who lives in San Diego zoo, is past breeding age. She was captured with Sudan — from Sudan — in 1975.
The northern white rhinos once ranged across the savannas of central and eastern Africa, from southern Chad to Uganda, but the last wild animal sighting was in Garamba National Park, in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in 2006. There have been unconfirmed sightings in South Sudan, but all the wild animals are thought to have been poached for their horns.