![]() ![]() The stem cell technique is only proven in a mouse, not in a rhinoceros, but it’s available to us. And there is still a rumor that there are some remaining individuals left in Sudan, but nobody can prove that. So, we never went and shortly after, all of those individuals were gone. But the trip was cancelled, due to the civil war. And actually, we were invited to go there to harvest more semen from the wild ones, when they were supposed to get a transponder put into their horns. At that time, there was the existing population of 30 individuals in Garamba. We did that, but we were not hopeful that it had any implication for saving the species. We went to San Diego Zoo, we scanned all the individuals there, we collected semen from the last bull, which had a poor semen quality. We were quite disappointed, because we worked with the northern white rhinos in the early 2000s, and all our efforts got less and less successful because of a very small population. While in the past, that was based on the number of fertile individuals in the population, that is no longer necessary-or at least in the future it will no longer be necessary, because every infertile or even dead animal can contribute to the population by utilizing this kind of technique. By pairing these two approaches, that gave us a totally new horizon on saving critically endangered species, and it also changed the way we evaluate the status of species which are on the brink of extinction. If you don’t get together enough genetic diversity in the population, then it makes no sense to speak about future reintroduction plans. What is new since 2012 was pairing that with stem cell technology, because for the northern white rhino, assisted reproduction would be not sufficient to actually create a self-sustaining population. ![]() Firstly, the in vitro technology that was already used for other species in the past. For the northern white rhino project, there are two really important developments.
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