![]() More southern white rhinoceroses are expected to be sent to Garamba National Park in the future. “This reintroduction is the start of a process whereby southern white rhino as the closest genetic alternative can fulfil the role of the northern white rhino in the landscape,” he said. But conflict, poaching and chronic insecurity in volatile DRC have decimated its wildlife over the years.Īfrican Parks CEO Peter Fearnhead was also quoted in the statement as saying that efforts to save the northern white rhinos in the park had been “too little, too late”. A century ago, the Northern was much more abundant than the Southern. There are two main subspecies: the Northern White and Southern White rhino. The operation was led by the ICCN, conservation NGO African Parks and Canadian mining firm Barrick Gold, which sponsored the rhino move.Įstablished in 1938, Garamba National Park is one of Africa’s oldest. southern white rhinoceros, ( Ceratotherium simum simum ), also called square-lipped rhinoceros, subspecies of the white rhinoceros ( Ceratotherium simum ). White rhino ( Ceratotherium simum) Overall, the story of the White rhino is a positive one. “The return of white rhinos to the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a testament to our country’s commitment to biodiversity conservation,” Yves Milan Ngangay, the director general of the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN), said in a statement. On March 28th, 2021, 19 oocytes were retrieved from Fatu's. The last northern white rhino in the park, which lies in the DRC’s northeast, was poached in 2006.Īccording to a joint statement from the park and conservation groups, 16 southern white rhinos have been transported from a private reserve in South Africa to Garamba. Once common across southern Africa, southern white rhinos were thought to be extinct in the late 19th century, but in 1895 a small population of less than 100. In the near future, the embryos will be transferred to southern white rhino surrogate mothers to develop northern white rhino offspring. Inbreeding invariably has bad consequences,” she adds.Sixteen southern white rhinoceroses have been released into Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), officials said on Saturday, reintroducing an endangered species that was decimated by poaching. “There is the additional challenge of acquiring the genetic diversity that is necessary to sustain a population. ![]() But further work is needed to see if such egg and sperm cells result in fertilised embryos, she says.Įven then, it is unclear whether southern white rhino surrogates would successfully carry the embryos to produce northern white rhino offspring, says Loring. “This was a lot of hard work, and it will be very beneficial to the field,” says Jeanne Loring at the Scripps Research Institute in California. Once they found the precise cocktail that successfully did this in southern white rhinos, they applied it to the northern white rhino stem cells and found it worked for them too. In what could now, with hindsight, be seen as a conservation success story the southern white rhino itself was on the brink of extinction a little more than a. Only two are left in the world - both are female. The team then tested different mixtures of growth factors and chemicals to make such stem cells from southern white rhinos turn into the precursors of sperm and egg cells, called primordial germ cell-like cells. 14 April 2020 Getty Images By Clare Spencer BBC News, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya The future of the northern white rhino is looking bleak. To test this method for northern white rhinos, Katsuhiko Hayashi at Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues first bathed skin cells from a female northern white rhino who died in 2015, called Nabire, in a cocktail of chemicals that turned them into stem cells with the potential to form any type of cell. A southern white rhino named Victoria gave birth to an artificially conceived calf at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park last Sunday, marking a milestone in the fight to save the closely related. There’s no point reviving the northern white rhino – yet
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