The pipe, I suggest to Pennington, surely means that your arm’s not going in there.

Once they’re done, they insert a rounded probe that’s the size of two fingers, and is taped to a foot-long long PVC pipe. The rhinos’ trainers have conditioned each animal to defecate in the yard before the procedure, but Pennington and Durrant still have to spend a fair amount of time scooping poop out. You have to go in through the rectum, which means there is, quite literally, a lot of shit in the way. Since rhinos are so large, ultrasound won’t work through their bellies or flanks. Pennington takes turns with Barbara Durrant, who directs the San Diego Zoo’s reproductive sciences team, to scan each of the six females, twice a week.įirst, they lead each rhino into a specially designed chute with an open panel at the rear. You can do this by scanning her ovaries with an ultrasound machine, to see if any of the egg-producing follicles within them have grown. To artificially impregnate a white rhino, you must first work out when she’s fertile. If that works, they’ll eventually try implanting them with artificially fertilized northern white rhino eggs. Eggs from the two last females could be fertilized in a test tube with Sudan’s frozen sperm, and then implanted into females of the southern white subspecies. The only way to save the northern white is through artificial means. Only two females remain, and they are both so inbred that neither of them can reproduce naturally.

The northern white-one of two white rhino subspecies-is in especially dire straits after Sudan, the last surviving male, died in March at the conservancy in Kenya where he lived. (Tammy Spratt / San Diego Zoo Global)Īll rhinos are endangered to varying degrees. An ultrasound shows an embryo growing inside Victoria the rhino.

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