After 17 years, researchers finally unlock the mysteries of Sumatran rhino reproduction.

An article by Jeremy Hance published in Mongabay on 28 SEPTEMBER 2018

• As the 20th century drew to a close the Sumatran rhino captive breeding program, launched in 1984, had yet to produce a single calf.
• Home to the last two Sumatran rhinos in the United States, the Cincinnati Zoo made several key discoveries about the species’ reproductive behavior, including the fact that females only ovulate when they have contact with males.
• Andalas, the first Sumatran rhino bred in captivity in more than a century, was born in Cincinnati in 2001. This success, and the subsequent birth of four other calves, has led to a re-evaluation of the program as a whole.
• Now, attention is turned to breeding centers in the rhinos’ original habitat as the future of captive breeding efforts.

This is the third article in our four-part series “The Rhino Debacle.” Read Part One and Part Two.

As we walk out into the zoo enclosure, Cossatot comes over to greet me. Cossatot is a capybara, the size of a very big dog; his species is the world’s largest rodent. He quickly determines from smelling my hands that I’ve neglected to bring him a treat. Looking a bit put out, he goes back to lounging in his one-man kingdom. But where Cossatot reigns was once the domain of an even larger, far more endangered animal. Little does Cossatot know, but his kingdom has made history. I’m visiting the old Sumatran rhino enclosures of Cincinnati Zoo with Terri Roth, head of the zoo’s Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW), and Paul Reinhart, leader of the team that cared daily for the rhinos.

Terri Roth inside one of the two enclosures at the Cincinnati Zoo that once housed Sumatran rhinos. Today the enclosures house a regal capybara named Cossatot and two emus. Image by Jeremy Hance for Mongabay.

Roth jokes that the enclosures have fallen far from their glory days when they housed arguably the rarest large terrestrial mammal on Earth.  The two enclosures — one for the male rhino, Ipuh, and the other for the female, Emi, and her calves — are now the domain of Cossatot and a pair of nervous emus. Above them are half-million-dollar metal structures that look like giant rectangular umbrellas, built to shade the rhinos’ eyes from the sun, just as the canopy does in the rainforest, and prevent severe eye damage.

“Every day we walk in here and I look at those pictures,” Reinhart says, pointing to photos of all the rhinos — Ipuh and Emi, Andalas and Suci, and, most beloved of all, Harapan — that once called Cincinnati home.

“I miss all of them,” he says.

Last Chance for the U.S.

In February of 1995, one year before Terri Roth would take the job as director of CREW, two Sumatran rhinos died within five days of each other at San Diego Zoo. This left just three Sumatran rhinos in the whole of the United States: Rapunzel, Emi and Ipuh, the sole male.

Over a decade before, in 1984, conservationists had kick-started a grand plan to capture Sumatran rhinos in the wild and breed them in facilities in Indonesia, Malaysia, the U.K. and the U.S. The bill for this large-scale undertaking was paid by the U.S. and U.K. zoos. Although conservationists were able to capture 40 rhinos over 11 years, the program had turned into a catastrophe. By 1995, nearly half of the 40 rhinos were already dead due to poor feeding practices, disease, accidents and simple ignorance. Moreover, not a single rhino had been bred in captivity. Now, there would be no more rhinos coming to the U.S. Due to a lack of success, the catching had ground to a halt, with the last rhino caught in Sabah, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, in 1995.

By this time, the U.K. had only one rhino, a male named Torgamba. Peninsular Malaysia had eight, but no luck breeding. Sabah had five, but only one female. Indonesia had two in captivity, both females.

One problem the program faced was a shortage of breeding pairs. In many cases, facilities had either an unbalanced sex ratio or single, mateless animals. This diagram shows the country (center ring) and facility (outer ring) where rhinos were held. Blue represents female rhinos and red, males. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay.

The U.S. zoo community, down to its last three rhinos, had one final shot at doing what it promised it could back in 1984: making a baby rhino. But the U.S. rhinos were scattered: Ipuh was at Cincinnati, Rapunzel at the Bronx Zoo, and Emi at L.A. Zoo.

Roth says it was the Cincinnati Zoo director, Ed Maruska, who convinced the other zoos to send their females. “They thought, ‘Well, if anyone will do it, then Maruska will do it.’”

By August 1995, just months after San Diego lost its two rhinos, the three survivors were all brought together at Cincinnati.

“I’d become very much smitten by the beast,” Maruska remembers of seeing his first Sumatran rhino. “It was a hairy animal. It was very unusual, very primitive looking. I thought in every shape or form, Cincinnati’s going to be a part of this program.”

Maruska then made his second big move: he hired Roth in 1996.

“Ed said, ‘We have got to breed these rhinos. It’s the last chance,’” Roth remembers.

No pressure.

Cracking it

Terri Roth’s office is full of rhinos: sculptured metal rhinos, stuffed toy rhinos, plastic rhinos, wood rhinos, and cinema-sized rhino posters. She doesn’t have an unnatural obsession with rhino replicas: nearly all of these are gifts, she says. Roth, who owns a small cattle farm over the border in Kentucky, has become something of a celebrity in the small circle of rhino people, because she accomplished something that many had begun to despair would never happen.

It’s not that no one had been trying to breed the rhinos from the time they were brought into captivity — they had. But the animals would fight, sometimes viciously, whenever they were brought together. And even when mating happened, something was off: the females weren’t getting pregnant.

The first thing Roth wanted to figure out was what was going on with the reproductive cycle of the females. They trained the two females, Emi and Rapunzel, to undergo ultrasounds without anesthesia, which would have been too risky.  They quickly discovered that Rapunzel would never have children: she had a large mass in her uterus. So now the U.S. was down to an Adam-and-Eve scenario: Emi and Ipuh.

They focused all their energy on Emi.

“We were working on her, three times a week, ultrasounds, conditioning her for blood collection, monitoring her for about eight months and I still couldn’t figure out her reproductive cycle,” Roth says. “You’re beating your head against the wall.”

Basically, Emi wasn’t ovulating.

It was in the summer of 1997 that Roth made a risky, but fateful, decision. She decided to put Emi and Ipuh together, even though they didn’t know Emi’s ovulating schedule. Solitary in the wild, males and females will frequently fight like hell when brought together. Sometimes the fights result in injury to one of the animals — not something you generally want to risk with a species on the edge of extinction.

Ipuh enjoys a meal of browse next to the pool in his enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. Image courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

To mitigate the risk, Roth and her team decided to do all they could to make sure Ipuh and Emi weren’t too ornery.

“We thought, ‘Let’s do it when it’s hot. Let’s do it after the male has had its breakfast.’ We put them out. Ipuh would eat his browse. He’d go into the pool, sink down and then we put Emi in.

“The keepers were all on alert. They were ready to jump in if they’re needed to. It actually worked pretty well because [Ipuh] was not really interested in picking a fight,” Roth says. “He was just in the water … Sometimes, Emi would go over to the pool and blow at him.” There were “no big skirmishes,” Roth recalls. “For the most part, they ignored each other.”

Reinhart adds that “it could have gone wrong every single day,” but they kept going.

And they did, for 42 days. Forty-two days of keepers having to put two near-one-ton, critically endangered animals into a potentially perilous situation.

“Then one day, there was just this total difference,” Roth says. “We put [Ipuh] out there and [Emi] went towards the pool and he started coming out of the pool.

“It was the most agreeable situation, shockingly. There was no chasing. There was [no] sparring, he just came out of the pool, started following her around and after a while started mounting her. We were ecstatic.”

But Ipuh was not exactly a seasoned lover.

“He tried … we even got lights out and left them together as late at night as we possibly could,” Roth says. “He mounted her and mounted her and mounted her and finally got exhausted but never was able to breed her.”

But that first encounter did lead to something historical.

“Two days after that … I did the ultrasound where I saw she ovulated for the first time,” Roth says.

A light bulb went off. It turns out the Sumatran rhino is an induced ovulator, which means the female needs something to kick-start her reproductive cycle. In the case of this species, Roth believes it’s the interaction with a male that allows a female to ovulate. Roth says they don’t even have to copulate to ovulate — they just need to spend time with a male at the right time in their cycle.

“We’ve even seen situations where the males run her around but not even [mount] her, and she’s ovulated. I think the ovulation is partly a response to the excitation of being with the male,” Roth says.

Researchers at the Cincinnati Zoo trained female rhinos to accept ultrasounds without anesthesia, allowing every stage of ovulation and pregnancy to be carefully monitored. Image courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

Still, the team didn’t know how long Emi’s cycle would be, so they started up again with the daily introductions, and 21 days later Ipuh and Emi tried again.

“She conceived on that one. That was the first pregnancy, which was shocking because it’s pretty quick,” Roth says. “We saw the little fetus developing. We saw a heartbeat. We sent out the press release. A week later, the embryo was gone. We thought, ‘At least we knew he was fertile. We knew things were working.’”

Indeed, the team had the information they needed: they knew Emi needed interaction with a male in order to ovulate, they knew her cycle was around 21 days, and they knew how long the follicle would grow during the cycle. Breeding had started to go well; pregnancy, not so much.

“Then she lost the second one, then she lost the third one and it actually became more challenging for me because people started saying, ‘It’s because of the ultrasound exams that she’s losing the pregnancy,’” Roth says. “I was forced to reduce the amount of work I was doing with her, instead of increasing it. Then we were learning less.”

At this point, Roth started to run lots of blood tests to see if she could find anything amiss, comparing them with blood samples from other captive rhinos in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Then Emi lost her fourth pregnancy, and her fifth.

“Finally, I just said, ‘Let’s just put her on the progesterone supplement because we don’t think it will harm anything, and it seems like it could only help and not hurt,’” she says. Progesterone is a hormone produced in the ovaries that becomes elevated during pregnancy. This was in 2000, four years after Roth was hired.
It worked — the sixth pregnancy finally stuck. But no one had any idea how long it would last.

“The only thing I could find was somebody had at some point said it was a seven-month gestation, which we didn’t believe because no rhino is that short,” Roth says.

In fact, 16 months later, Emi gave birth to a baby boy: Andalas. He was not only the first Sumatran rhino born in captivity in 112 years, but the first tangible success of that tragedy-filled program launched in 1984.

The Cincinnati effect

Cincinnati Zoo, the second-oldest in the country, sits smack-dab in the city among the rolling hills surrounding the Ohio River. Generally considered one of the world’s top zoos, it has a long history of breakthrough captive-breeding successes, from giraffes to trumpeter swans to bison.

But perhaps none of the zoo’s past glories could compete with the birth of Andalas.

In many ways, Tom Foose, conservation coordinator for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and the driving force behind the 1984 meeting to launch the captive-breeding program, had a point about why U.S. and U.K. zoos should have a crack at breeding Sumatran rhinos: the world’s best zoos had both the expertise and the technology to have the best chance of success.

“That’s what I love about the Sumatran rhino story because it’s a perfect example of how zoos can contribute,” Roth says. And Cincinnati was even more distinct than many zoos. Not only did it have a long history of captive breeding and expertise, but it also had an entire research facility, CREW, devoted to this kind of work.

“We often have a discussion here at CREW about the disconnect between the reproductive sciences and conservation. There is so much power in that kind of technology, but it’s used so little in real conservation efforts,” Roth says.

Andalas, the first Sumatran rhino bred and born in captivity in over a century. Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

At the same time, Cincinnati Zoo, and the zoo community in general, suffered relentless criticism over the program.

“We felt it constantly. Partly because westerners, partly because zoo, probably partly because female,” Roth says.

Maruska says they took “a lot of fire” even from the wider zoo community. They were accused of taking wild animals out of their habitat just to exhibit them; they were told they’d never succeed.

“We faced the same with the California condor,” Maruska says. “We had people from the Audubon Society saying, ‘Let the birds die in dignity.’ Well, there is no dignity in extinction. Come on.”

Roth remembers that the zoo was even accused of making up pregnancies during the period when Emi was losing one after another.

“And then the negative stuff about, ‘They’re losing pregnancies, they must be doing something wrong there. Cincinnati is a bad environment,’” she says. “But we just kept at it. I just kept our eyes on the goal, and this is what we need to accomplish.”

Roth and the Cincinnati team may be the single most important reason for the eventual success. Roth was able to make astoundingly difficult decisions and then, perhaps even more importantly, stay the course when the criticism became overwhelming.

“Terri was the person that really did the job,” Maruska says.

It just took them — and everyone, in fact — much longer to produce calves than anyone could have expected at the 1984 meeting.

“Hell, I think we did a yeoman’s job with a handful of animals,” Maruska says. “I believe that if we had our full complement of animals, we’d [have] been a lot farther than we are today. I really do.”

The next step for Roth, however, was proving that Andalas wasn’t a fluke, and that Emi and Ipuh could replicate their little miracle.

In this 2017 image, Zulfi Arsan, head veterinarian at Indonesia’s Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary, hand feeds US-born rhino Andalas. Photo by Jeremy Hance for Mongabay.

Fast forwarding

In 2004, Emi gave birth to her second calf, Suci. Then, in 2007, she gave birth to her third, Harapan. She successfully carried both these calves without the use of synthetic hormones.

“People thought it was really risky, but I really wanted to prove that they could do this themselves in a managed breeding program,” Roth says. Still, she believes the progesterone was vital for that first pregnancy in getting Emi over the “hump.”

“Once they’re producing, just keep them producing because everything is healthy, and everything is working right, you don’t want to stop that,” she says.

Unfortunately, Emi died in 2009 of iron storage disease, though at the time the team had no idea what was wrong. It’s an “insidious” disease, according to Roth, that can only be diagnosed after death.

In 2013, the zoo decided to euthanize Ipuh. Suffering from cancer, Ipuh had stopped eating and was barely able to walk.

Detail of Ipuh, whose taxidermed remains are currently housed at the University of Cincinnati. Photo by Jeremy Hance for Mongabay.

“It’s hard to describe when they were born, it’s even harder to describe when an animal passes away,” says Reinhart, who spent 22 years caring for Ipuh. “[He] contributed so much to the species and the knowledge and the propagation of these animals and he stayed with us to the very end.” Today, his preserved body rests at the University of Cincinnati.

An even bigger heartbreak came a little over a year later when Suci, Emi and Ipuh’s daughter, died from iron storage disease, the same sickness that took her mother.

“With Suci, we suspected it when she started showing the same symptoms that Emi did,” Roth says. For a while, Suci, just 9 years old, improved with aggressive treatment, but a few months later her health worsened. “Her liver was just too damaged,” Roth says.

She believes iron storage disease was an issue at Cincinnati because the rainforest rhinos have evolved to live with multitudes of parasites and biting insects that constantly drain them of blood.

“They’re trying to absorb as much iron as they can from what little iron they get on their diets because they have this constant load of parasites. They’re bleeding, and they’re having to build up tissues that parasites have chewed down, so they need it all the time,” she says. “We bring them into our zoos or our facilities and we get rid of all the parasites, and they don’t have that outlet anymore, so they’re not losing iron anymore.”

By the time of Suci’s death, the Sumatran rhino program had shifted significantly. During the period when Cincinnati Zoo was struggling to produce just one calf, many experts began to feel the best thing for the species would be to bring them into managed sanctuaries in their local environment. This way, the rhinos would have direct access to their wild, natural foods and, many experts believed, this might help induce mating and decrease the chance of disease.

Harapan, born at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio, now lives at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas National Park in Lampung, Indonesia. Photo by Rahmadi Rahmad/Mongabay-Indonesia.

In 1998, Indonesia opened the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary (SRS) deep in Way Kambas National Park, a park also home to some of the last wild Sumatran rhinos on Earth. Two females were brought from zoos in Indonesia that year, as was Torgamba, all the way from the U.K. Unfortunately, breeding between these pairs was never successful.

Still, by the late 1990s, the SRS and the Sungai Dusun rhino center in Malaysia — where six rhinos would die in 2003 — were beginning to be seen as the future of the program.

In 2007, the U.S. sent Andalas, the first calf born in captivity, thousands of miles to the SRS in the hope that he could find an unrelated mate. It was time for the Cincinnati staff to transfer what they learned overseas.

“We really work hard here, that whatever we develop here it’s not about ‘mine, mine, mine,’” Roth says. “That’s why I was just so pleased that they were able to do it in Indonesia.”

Andalas mated successfully with Ratu, a wild rhino found roaming near a village in 2005 and brought to the SRS for her safety. Their union produced Andatu, a male, in 2012, and Delilah, a female, in 2016.

“It is a really good template; the hardest thing is to get people to follow it,” Roth says of the subsequent breeding successes. One of the most challenging bits is simply allowing the animals to spar, which Roth believes is a natural part of their breeding process.

“You have to have confidence that you knew what you’re looking at,” she says. “And to hold your ground and say, ‘No, keep them together, keep them together, keep them together,’ because after an hour or two, they’re going to settle down and they’ll breed.”

Cincinnati then made one of its toughest decisions yet: to send Harapan, its last rhino, and the public’s favorite, to Indonesia.

“Many of us really wished we could just get more rhinos. We wished we could have gotten a female from Indonesia and bred her with Harapan, and kept the program going. That was hard,” Roth says. But it was clear that the best thing for the species was to let Harapan go.

In 2015, Harapan, took the same journey from Cincinnati to Sumatra as his elder brother, in the hope that he, too, would breed successfully with one of the females at the SRS. Harapan was the last rhino in Cincinnati — and the last Sumatran rhino in the U.S.

Zookeepers load the crate in which Harapan will travel from Ohio to Indonesia. Image courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

“We miss him here,” Reinhart says. “He’s in a better place, but he was our last born and we really loved him here. I do miss him still.”

Harapan’s arrival in Sumatra marked not only the last Sumatran rhino leaving the Western Hemisphere, but also 20 years since the close of the original captive-breeding program. The 1984 program was still a long way away from achieving a sustainable population in captivity that could, if nothing else, ensure the species wouldn’t go the way of the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly rhino. However, conservationists had ensured that by 2015 there was still a chance to do so.

Read the full article on Mongabay.

Capturing Sumatran rhinos was one thing. Keeping them alive turned out to be another thing entirely. 

An article by Jeremy Hance published in Mongabay by 24 SEPTEMBER 2018

• An agreement to launch a captive breeding program was brokered in 1984. By 1985, key participants began pulling out, including the Malaysian state of Sabah.
• Despite the setbacks, efforts to capture rhinos quickly got up and running. Keeping the animals healthy proved to be a much greater challenge.
• By 1995, nearly half of the 40 rhinos caught were dead, and none of them had successfully bred in captivity.

This is the second article in the Mongabay four-part series “The Rhino Debacle.” Read Part One here.

No one knows when humans first encountered the Sumatran rhinoceros, the smallest, hairiest, most loquacious and arguably strangest of all living rhinos. But that initial face-to-face probably occurred some 60,000 or 70,000 years ago as humans first pushed their way across the Asian continent and reached what are today the forests of northeast India.

It probably didn’t go well for the rhino. Those early migrants must have been adept hunters to survive, and their first real interaction probably ended with rhino meat roasting over a fire.

Early human hunting of Sumatran rhinos isn’t speculation. Scientists have found their bones in the Niah and Madai caves in Borneo, leftovers from a Pleistocene hunt. A recent study also found that Sumatran rhino populations plummeted during the Pleistocene. While the researchers believe the decline was due to climate change and subsequent habitat loss, they also note hunting may have played a part. It’s hard to imagine it didn’t, given the role of human hunting in wiping out other megafauna worldwide. Whatever was responsible, by the end of the Pleistocene, only 500 to 1,300 Sumatran rhinos were left.

Nine thousand years later, a small group of humans were doing something very different from their forebears. They were trying to catch Sumatran rhinos — not to roast them over fires or chop off their horns for sham medicine, but to breed them in captivity. They hoped to ensure the survival of this ancient mammal that had split off from all other living rhinos a shocking 20 million plus years ago.

“The Sumatran rhino is in all essence, in all sense a living fossil. It’s been around relatively unchanged since the Oligocene period,” says Ed Maruska, director of Cincinnati Zoo from 1984 to 1994, when it ran a rhino captive-breeding program.

This means losing the Sumatran rhino cannot be compared to the potential extinction of any other rhino species, as it represents a distinct genus, evolutionarily cut off from all other living mammals by around 25 million years.

Things Start to Fall Apart

At the conclusion of a 1984 meeting in Singapore on Sumatran rhinos, conservationists had a bold, international, cooperative agreement that they hoped would establish a large and secure captive population for the species, ensuring it would never vanish from the face of the Earth — even if it vanished from the wild.

Teams in Peninsular Malaysia, the state of Sabah on Malaysian Borneo, and in Indonesia’s Sumatra Island would attempt the capture of so-called “doomed” rhinos, i.e. those left over in forests, often slated to be cleared, where they were unlikely to survive in the long term. These animals would then be split up into breeding pairs between Malaysia, Indonesia, two zoos in the U.K. and four in the U.S. The agreement included funding and technical assistance from the U.K. and U.S., and was predicated on the idea that decisions were always to be made with an eye toward what would be best for the species.

“There was a lot of optimism, hope and expectation in the early days that a captive propagation program … could be successfully developed,” said the plan’s architect, Tom Foose, in a 2000 Animal Planet documentary titled “The Last Rhino.” “We were reproducing three other species of rhinos in captivity and so there was every reason to expect we would be able to achieve the same kind of success with the Sumatran rhino.”

But this grand plan began to unravel with remarkable rapidity.

First, two of the zoos that had initially showed interest — Miami Zoo and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. — dropped out due to the high costs.

Then things went sour in Sabah. In 1985, elections sent the ruling party, in power for nine years, out into the cold.

A rhino captured in Malaysia crated and loaded on a truck for transport. Within a few years of the 1984 meeting, Malaysia decided not to send rhinos to zoos in the U.S. or U.K. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

“All the new ministers decided, ‘We don’t need to work with foreigners, we’re perfectly able to do things ourselves, we’ll save the rhino,’” says John Payne, who was with WWF-Malaysia at the time in Sabah, and now runs the Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA).

Sabah’s Forestry Department had favored the plan and argued for preserving it. But once the news broke that Sabah would be sending a few pairs of rhinos abroad, several local NGOs protested, the public raised a fuss, and eventually the new government pulled out of the agreement.

“Sabah was the first to blink,” Payne says. “Basically, it was a disaster, right? It meant … all the previous discussions are a waste of time, at least as far as Sabah was concerned.”

Next, Peninsular Malaysia, which already had one rhino housed at Malacca Zoo, showed no interest in sending any of its rhinos to either the U.S. or U.K. At the time, experts estimated Peninsular Malaysia had 50 to 121 rhinos, though the real number was probably lower.

“I was in favor of sending our rhinos to the States,” says Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan, at the time the director general of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks of Malaysia. “[But] the Malaysian public and many in the department were against [it]. They are still. The hue and cry was too great. They were wrong as the Americans were really good friends and very closely worked with me.”

This graph depicts the lifespan in captivity of Sumatran rhinos that ended up in facilities in Malaysia, according to their final place of residence. Of this group, the only rhino to give birth in captivity was Rima, who was pregnant when she was captured. Tam and Iman are still alive, and are currently the only Bornean rhinos in captivity. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay

The reluctance in both Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia to share rhinos meant that, in the end, U.S. and U.K. zoos could only depend on one population of rhinos: those from Sumatra. John Aspinall, who owned two zoos in the U.K., already had a deal with Indonesia. After losing access to Malaysia’s rhinos, the newly formed Sumatran Rhino Trust, based in the U.S., signed a similar agreement.

But who would get the first rhinos? There were four U.S. zoos with a stake in it, all clamoring for a chance.

The zoo directors did the only thing that seemed fair: they drew straws. Cincinnati got the longest, then the Bronx Zoo, then San Diego Zoo. Los Angeles Zoo drew the short straw.

“Warren Thomas [director of L.A. Zoo] was infuriated that we got the pair of animals and he didn’t,” Maruska says. “In fact, he called me on the phone. He said, ‘I want that female.’ I said, ‘No way.’ ‘Well, I want to breed rhino,’ he said. I said, ‘So do we and we will.’”

The first rhino arrived in the U.S. in November 1984, wintering in L.A. before heading on to Cincinnati.

The U.S. zoos hoped to get 20 to 25 rhinos; they ended up with seven.

Catching rhinos

Even as the cooperative plan unraveled, one thing progressed: catching rhinos.

On Peninsular Malaysia, Khan and his team caught two rhinos in 1985 and two more in 1986.

Led by mammal-capturing expert Tony Parkinson, teams in Sumatra caught their first rhino in Riau province in 1985, just 11 months after the meeting. The rhino, dubbed Torgamba, was a massive male who would survive an astounding 26 years in captivity, making his way to the U.K. in 1986 and eventually back to Sumatra.

Parkinson and his team caught five more rhinos in the wilds of Sumatra the next year, though one died during capture.

Sabah was far slower in capturing rhinos, in part due to its political changes. The first rhino in Sabah was caught in March of 1987. But it was injured in the trap and died at the scene.

“There was no expertise at all,” Payne says of the team put together to catch the first rhinos in Sabah, which had eschewed all international assistance and advice. “So, the first rhino died in a pit trap. It was sort of around that time that I lost interest and thought there was no point to continue.”

Payne would take a break from rhinos until he got involved again in 2007.

A transport crate prepared for one of the rhinos captured in Peninsular Malaysia. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

A second rhino was caught nearly four months later; this one survived.

“We were scared as no one had seen [a] Sumatran rhino in the wild [for] more than a few minutes,” says Khan of the early days trapping the one-ton animals. “Capturing these animals will put them in great danger.”

Of the 40 captures from 1984 to 1995, three rhinos died due to injuries from the traps: two in Sabah and one in Sumatra. Khan didn’t lose a single rhino in a trap.

However, those rhinos that survived capture did not thrive in captivity. Even as more rhinos were being caught, the death toll was quickly mounting.

By Jan. 1, 1990, eight of the 26 captured animals were already lost — a mortality rate of 30 percent.

This graph depicts the lifespans in captivity of wild-caught rhinos held in facilities in Indonesia. Bina is the only survivor of the original capture program. She lives at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas along with Rosa, Ratu and her two calves, and two male rhinos bred in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay.

Stacking mortalities

The “cause of death” column for the Sumatran rhinos caught between 1984 and 1995 makes for some grim reading: strangulation, hindgut obstruction, cancer, fallen branch, poor diet.

While conservationists could catch rhinos, they had a far harder time keeping them alive. In the wild, the species is estimated to have a lifespan of 35 to 40 years; on average, the animals caught during this period survived less than nine years in captivity.

There is only survivor left from this period alive today: Bina. Residing at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary (SRS) in Way Kambas National Park today, she’s been in captivity for 27 years. Conservationists are still trying to get her to breed.

But why did so many rhinos die? Experts point to several reasons. First, because conservationists were catching only so-called doomed rhinos, many of the rhinos caught were probably older and part of populations that had long been facing genetic decline and catastrophe.

“’Doomed rhinos’ tend to be the last dregs, right? The very last one, two or three before the [population] dies,” Payne says.

This graph illustrates the date of capture, and time and place of death, of the Sumatran rhinos that were captured in Indonesia and brought to the United States as part of captive breeding efforts. Ipuh (male) and Emi (female) were the only pair to successfully breed. Image by Willie Shubert/Mongabay.

Making matters worse, zoos and sanctuaries fed the rhinos all wrong in the beginning. They were accustomed to caring for black and white rhinos, grazing species that do well on hay, were ignorant of how to cater to the Sumatran rhino’s particular needs. “I think there likely was a sentiment that a rhino was a rhino was a rhino,” says Susie Ellis, the head of the International Rhino Foundation.

Keepers at first fed the Sumatran rhino as if it were a white rhino, a species not even in the same genus.

“San Diego immediately lost their animal due to … twisted gut syndrome,” Maruska says. “It’s the same thing that happens in horses when they’re overfed grain. They were feeding their animals buckets of grain.”

Maruska’s zoo, Cincinnati, faced the same issues. Paul Reinhart, the zoo’s Sumatran rhino keeper at the time, says the first rhino sent to the U.S., a female named Mahatu in 1989, “didn’t thrive here.” She died just three years after her arrival.

“We didn’t know much about the Sumatran rhino, not many people did,” Reinhart says. “We assumed you could keep them like Indian rhino and like black [rhinos], feed [them] high-quality alfalfa grain, browse … and that was not the case, not even remotely the case … The animals didn’t thrive in captivity until we logged on to feeding them large amounts of browse, which we got from San Diego and Florida.”

As tropical rainforest animals, Sumatran rhinos, it turned out, didn’t eat grasses, but leaves and branches whole. They tend to pull vegetation into their mouths, and just chomp away until it’s all gone.

Ipuh lived at the Cincinnati Zoo for 22 years until his death in 2013. His remains are still on display in Cincinnati. Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

In 1991, Ipuh, a male, arrived at Cincinnati Zoo. He was already looking wan, so Cincinnati Zoo called San Diego Zoo to ask for some “browse,” i.e. trimmings of ficus trees growing around the zoo.

Reinhart says that when the keeper hosed off the branches, Ipuh responded immediately: standing up and coming over to smell the fresh branches.

“It took him about a year and a half to really come back to where he needed to be,” Reinhart says.

Another issue was disease. The rhinos, probably older and genetically inbred, were dealing with cancer, eye problems, iron storage disease, parasites, and in some cases bacterial infections. In a 2013 paper, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, John Payne and Zainal Zahari Zainuddin argued that some of the mortalities to disease could have been avoided.

“Most egregious of all, basic hygiene was generally poor [in Malaysian facilities], with at least some Sumatran rhinos kept for long periods in facilities that lacked basic hygiene protocols and biosecurity measures, and lacked experienced veterinary care,” they wrote.

As an example, the paper noted that treated piped water was only brought into Malacca Zoo for the Sumatran rhinos after two animals had died.

“I think a lot of … rhinos died through bacterial infections that could have and should have been treated with antibiotics but never were,” Payne says.

There were also accidents. A female named Melintang accidently strangled herself in an improperly constructed fence after being gifted to Thailand. A male named Tanjung was killed by a fallen branch — something that could have happened in the forest as well. Another male, Bulud, escaped his captors after only four months; he was never caught again.

Sungai Dusun

The worst 18 days for Sumatran rhino conservation came in October and November 2003. Five rhinos, four females and one male, died at the Malaysian Sumatran Rhino Centre in Sungai Dusun.

A male rhino, Shah, had died there a year earlier, followed by a female, Rima, just that April. Then, on Oct. 28, Seputin, a female, was found dead. Eleven days later, Ara, the only male, died. The next day, a female named Panjang died. The last two females, Minah and Mas Merah, died the following week.

With them went the entire captive population in Peninsular Malaysia.

“It was most painful to watch the great sufferings leading to the deaths of these precious animals,” Khan says.

No one knows for certain what happened. But two competing theories have taken root. One: that the animals died of trypanosomiasis, a type of parasite spread by biting flies.

“I would say that we have a lot of evidence indicating they died of trypanosomiasis,” says Terri Roth, a rhino expert and head of CREW, a research facility at Cincinnati Zoo, who was co-author of a paper that laid out the evidence a year after the tragedy. Roth and others believe that nearby water buffalo, which often waded in a canal that ran adjacent to the center, may have been the source. Flies may have bitten the water buffalo and then bitten the rhinos as well.

The other theory is that the animals died of bacterial infections, such as E. coli and pneumonia. According to the paper by Ahmad, Payne and Zainuddin, trypanosomes probably only infected the animals after their immune systems had already been weakened by E. coli and pneumonia due to allegedly poor management at the facility. Otherwise, they argued, why didn’t trypanosomiasis kill these animals during the 18 years prior?

“The conclusion that trypanosomes were the cause of the [Sungai Dusun] deaths may have been reached erroneously, in order to allow parties involved to avoid responsibility for chronic poor hygiene in the facilities,” the paper concluded.

Officially, the cause of death has been listed as trypanosomiasis.

All but one female mated with a male at Sungai Dusun, notes Terri Roth who visited the facility and says the rhinos appeared to be well cared for. Image by Terri Roth.

“I visited the Sumatran Rhino Conservation Centre at Sungai Dusun several times,” Roth says. “In general, the facility was nice, the rhinos appeared healthy, well cared for and in good body condition.”

She says the staff had succeeded in mating the males with the females, but without a successful birth due to fertility problems.

“I believe Sungai Dusun has received much undeserved criticism due to its tragic ending,” she adds. “Sure, it was not perfect, but it was a decent facility where rhinos frequently mated.”

After the center lost all of its rhinos, Sungai Dusun switched to housing Asian tapirs. In 2010, seven tapirs died of E. coli and pneumonia.

Whatever, the cause of the tragedy at Sungai Dusun, it highlighted a salient point: housing too many endangered animals in one area is incredibly risky.

“That’s why we worry so much about something like that happening at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary [in Way Kambas] because those rhinos are close enough [in] proximity that if one gets sick with something like that, it could spread very quickly,” Roth says.

The fallout for Malaysia was swift and large.

“Tom [Foose] thought that we were sabotaged and withdrew the [U.S.] funds,” Khan says. “I crawled to find money and by 2010-2011 our rhinos were thought extinct.”

Where Did it All Go Wrong?

By 1995, the captive-breeding rhino program looked doomed. Forty animals had been caught — 12 from Peninsular Malaysia, 10 from Sabah and 18 from Sumatra. And a shocking 19, nearly half, were dead. And this was before the disaster at Sungai Dusun.

Exacerbating this failure, the program hadn’t produced even a single calf 11 years after the landmark meeting in Singapore — even though the entire goal of the program ostensibly was to create baby rhinos. In 1993, the Sumatran Rhino Trust, once such a promising endeavor, went belly-up.

Not only did the program look doomed, it looked like a conservation embarrassment.

Payne says he believes the original sin of the captive-breeding program was its commitment to only taking animals out of populations that were already destined to vanish because of either too few rhinos or impending logging and agriculture. This, he says, was at once politically expedient and a good cover against critics who argued rhinos shouldn’t be removed from the wild. But it also meant conservationists were removing rhinos that were more likely to be old, genetically inbred, and hadn’t seen another living rhino in ages.

“It was a fateful flaw right from the beginning to only catch doomed rhinos because it was all the trash, old, [reproductively] unfit ones that were then going to be captured,” Payne says.

Puntung, pictured here with veterinarian Zainal Zainuddin shortly after her capture in 2011, was euthanized in 2017. Suffering from cancer, she was estimated to be around 25 when she died. Image courtesy of BORA.

Many of the females caught already had or quickly developed reproductive issues, including uterine tumors, likely due to going without breeding for so long. Rhinos, even in large protected areas, had simply become too few to find each other, according to Payne.

“People assume the rhinos know where each other are, and they’re humping each other. Of course they don’t … They just live out their life there … without ever breeding,” he says.

Over time such tumors made the females totally infertile. The males, meanwhile, may have arrived already aged, with low sperm counts.

“You can’t have a successful breeding program if you don’t have reproductively viable animals,” says the International Rhino Foundation’s Ellis, noting that when the SRS in Way Kambas started in 1996 it didn’t have any breeding success until 2005, when it got a young female, Ratu, from the wild.

A bridge and crate used to transfer captured Sumatran rhinos during the original program in 1984. Image courtesy of Francesco Nardelli. Targeting such small populations for captive breeding also led to extreme gender imbalance in captivity. In Peninsular Malaysia, only two of the 11 adult rhinos caught were male. The situation was nearly the exact opposite in Sabah, where six males were caught (plus another two that died during the trapping), and only two females.

The trapping program in Sumatra was the only one that didn’t result in a gender imbalance: seven males to 10 females (not including one that died in the trap).

This gender imbalance was worsened by an unwillingness both to share the rhinos internationally or to combine subspecies. Had Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia been willing to mix their two different subspecies, they may have had more luck breeding, since Sabah had mostly males and Peninsular Malaysia mostly females.

Although the groups pledged cooperation and to do the best they could for the species, this didn’t always happen. For example, Malaysia, which had refused to send any rhinos to the U.K. or the U.S., sent one of its female rhinos as a gift to the king of Thailand in 1985. She died after one year, mateless, when she got caught in her fence at Bangkok’s Dusit Zoo and accidently strangled herself.  Sometimes, a single rhino would linger for years at a facility without a mate.

Melintang was captured in 1985 in Peninsular Malaysia. She was then sent to Thailand as a gift to the nation’s king. She died less than a year and a half after her capture due to unintentional strangulation in the fenced enclosure at Dusit Zoo. The bars were not the right width apart. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

The decision by both Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia meant that zoos in the U.S. and U.K. had, at best, only a couple of rhinos to attempt any captive breeding.

“We didn’t have enough animals to work with. We had a small handful of them, but we had to learn all of this from these few animals,” says Maruska from Cincinnati Zoo, the first institution to actually achieve a birth. “If we could have had our full limit of the 25 animals, the program would have been … more apt to be successful.”

At the same time, feeding the animals the wrong food and trying to overcome disease meant many animals didn’t survive long. Erong, a male calf caught in Peninsular Malaysia in 1984, was an extreme example.

“Full cream milk was given by a ranger and he was told to stop it,” Khan says. “Erong was so young and could not digest the milk. I believe it was the cause of death … We looked and shudder[ed] in great fear as it died in front of us.”

Erong, a male calf caught in Sumatra was given full cream milk by a ranger. He died shortly after. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

Much of this, of course, isn’t exactly shocking, given so little was known about this species in the wild. But the situation was exacerbated by what Payne calls “unhealthy competition” among institutions and an unwillingness to share information — a problem that some sources say continues to plague conservation efforts today.

Maruska also says they waited too long.

“It’s the same thing they did with the California condor, they wait till there’s a small number of animals and then it’s the last, last ditch attempt to [breed the species]. Instead of looking ahead.”

In 1995, at the height of the program’s problems, a new paper hit like a bomb. Alan Rabinowitz’s now classic “Helping a Species Go Extinct: the Sumatran Rhino in Borneo” eviscerated the decade-long strategy. A hugely respected conservationist, Rabinowitz, then with the Wildlife Conservation Society, harshly criticized the approach to Sumatran rhinos, which he wrote focused “time, money and effort” on captive-breeding efforts over protection in the wild.

“In Sabah, the easiest, most palatable, and most visible steps … were taken first,” he wrote. Habitat was only protected when it was “not controversial” and “caused minimal interference with ongoing logging activities and agricultural development plans.”

In the paper, Rabinowitz disputed the idea that many of the rhino populations were already doomed, calling such research “removed from the real world.” Instead, Rabinowitz said successfully protecting the species required tackling the threats of habitat destruction and poaching via more protected areas and more boots on the ground.

“The implication that captive breeding can save the Sumatran rhino makes the failure of in situ conservation less serious. This, in turn, helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy that wild [populations] have a low probability of survival,” he wrote.

Conservationists relied on makeshift bridges to capture rhinos in remote areas. Critics argue that more should have been done to protect these habitats. Image courtesy of Francesco Nardelli.

In the paper, Rabinowitz pointed out that by 1995 we still didn’t know how many rhinos were actually left — a fact still true more than 20 years later.

“While some of the blame … must be placed on the Indonesian and Malaysian governments, the rest of it falls squarely in the lap of international funding and conservation organizations,” Rabinowitz wrote, saying that NGOs had refrained from calling for anything difficult in order to avoid “becoming an unwelcome guest.”

Basically, conservation NGOs had bent over backward to agricultural and logging interests, a fact that still often proves true today.

In May this year, shortly before his death in August, Rabinowitz told Mongabay that his opinion of that early program hadn’t changed. However, he said what had changed was the situation today, both in terms of captive-breeding success and rhino populations on the ground.

In 1995, the last rhino for the captive-breeding program was caught in Sabah. His name was Malbumi. He would be dead in less than 18 months. The cause? Uncertain.

Read the full article on Mongabay.

The untold story of two days in Singapore that launched a wildly ambitious, and calamitous, captive breeding program.

An article by BY JEREMY HANCE was published on Mongabay on 20 SEPTEMBER 2018

Part 1 of a four article series.

• A 1984 agreement between zoos, conservationists and government officials marked the formal beginning of an international program that brought 40 Sumatran rhinos into captivity in an attempt to ward off extinction. Within 11 years, the program collapsed.
• The program was long viewed as an epic failure due to high mortality rates and the lack of live births for over a decade; it also paved the way for later breeding successes that just may offer the Sumatran rhino hope for the future.
• As conservationists mull a new plan to capture more rhinos, what lessons do past efforts offer?

It’s hardly the most likely place to meet a Sumatran rhino. But as you enter Zimmer Hall at the University of Cincinnati , deep in the heart of the Midwestern United States, there he is: Ipuh. A one-ton, taxidermed behemoth, a prehistoric relic who only passed away in 2013.

In life — well, really in death — he resembles a purple-hued, thick-skinned antediluvian hog: his horns have been shaved off; his thick, reddish fringe hair is nowhere to be seen. His expression could be called somber, even grim. But I’ve been fortunate to have met enough Sumatran rhinos in my life to know they are actually gentle, joyful, singing creatures. So I try not to take him too seriously as he rests between the vending machines and lounges for students.

Ipuh is not exactly famous. But he probably should be: Ipuh is the first Sumatran rhino bull to sire a calf in captivity in 112 years.

Born in the wilds of Sumatra, Ipuh is to-date the most prolific male breeder of his species in captivity. His taxidermed remains now reside at the University of Cincinnati. Image by Jeremy Hance for Mongabay.

The calf, a male named Andalas, was born in 2001, the direct and long-awaited result of a historic meeting 17 years earlier in Singapore. The meeting launched a global captive-breeding program for the species — a program that would meet with tragic failure and much folly until, finally, the first taste of success in Andalas. Four more calves have been born since.

But it’s a program with which conservationists are still struggling to reconcile: was it a poor strategy that ended in total failure, or has it given us a second chance to save the species?

Today, the Sumatran rhino is arguably the rarest large terrestrial mammal on the planet. Officially, experts say around 100 animals survive in the wild, but unofficially the number could be as low as 30. We have an additional nine rhinos in captivity, but only two of those have been proven to breed: a female named Ratu, and Andalas — yes, that first son of Ipuh and Emi, his wild-born bride.

Now, conservationists are mulling a new capture program to add new rhinos to the small pool of captive rhinos in a last-ditch effort to ensure the species survives the Anthropocene.

The 1984 Meeting
A 39-year-old Tom Foose, conservation coordinator for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), arrived in Singapore in October 1984 with a bold new plan to save the Sumatran rhino from extinction. He’d already laid the groundwork with Sabah, one of Malaysia’s Bornean states, for a proposal to catch several Sumatran rhino pairs and split them between local facilities and several U.S. zoos, which would be footing the bill.

Now he just needed to convince a group of rhino experts and conservationists, brought together by the Asian Rhino Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), that this was the best way forward.

“He’s really nerdy. He’s unfit, short-sighted, addicted to Coca-Cola, not a field person at all,” said John Payne, at the time a project manager for WWF-Malaysia and a representative of the Sabah Forestry Department. “He’s really the brains. He realized somehow … that the Sumatran rhino was going to go extinct. And the reason was that there were too few and they weren’t breeding. It was very clear to him then. So, he got a bee in his bonnet, right?”

An ocean away, someone else appears to have been harassed by the same bee. John Aspinall, an eccentric zoo owner from the U.K. who’d made his fortune as a bookie for the British upper class, had hatched a similar plan to capture wild rhinos and split them between the host country and the financier — in this case, Indonesia and Aspinall’s zoos in the U.K., respectively.

“Several of the personalities in human history were misunderstood, criticized or even condemned at first, to recognize only much later their geniality. I would place the conservationist John Aspinall among them,” Francesco Nardelli, the executive director of the Sumatran Rhino Project, said of the man he worked with for 12 years. “A man of substance.”

Nico Van Strien, Tom Foose, Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan and Ed Maruska, then the director of the Cincinnati Zoo, at a 2001 event celebrating Andalas, the first rhino born as a result of the captive breeding program. Image courtesy of Terri Roth.

There was also Nico Van Strien, just 38 and already the undisputed expert on all things Sumatran rhino. Having just published a landmark 211-page dissertation on Sumatran rhino behavior and ecology, van Strien could be described as the only living academic expert on wild Sumatran rhinos.

Van Strien touched down with his latest estimates of how many animals were left across dozens of potential populations. Already, the species was one of the most endangered large mammals on Earth. It was believed to be extinct from most of its range, from northeastern India to Vietnam, only surviving in Sumatra, Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, though a few were thought to still linger in Thailand and Myanmar.

Van Strien’s 1984 figures put the population at somewhere between 481 and 873 (in 1986, the IUCN would estimate between 425 and 800 were left). But many of his numbers are just educated guesses. In several places, van Strien noted, the numbers were unknown or else based on “unconfirmed reports” or “tracks.” In all likelihood, the real numbers were probably closer to van Strien’s low estimate, and maybe even considerably below that. Many of the large populations he cited either vanished in the next decades or were never there in such numbers to begin with. Kerinci Seblat National Park in Sumatra, for example, was supposed to have 250 to 500 animals; officials announced the rhino extinct there just 20 years later.

The meeting also included several heads of U.S. zoos keen on the project, as well as a number of government officials from Malaysia and Indonesia. Of the 23 attendees, only two were women. Eight of the attendees were non-westerners from Southeast Asia, representing Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, where the meeting was held.

The meeting, described in its summary report as the “Ad Hoc Sumatran Rhino Meeting,” would forever change the previously haphazard nature of Sumatran rhino capture and captivity. And it would kick-start a program that would go down, for a long time, as a total and absolute failure, a conservation debacle of epic proportions: A catastrophe that would take decades to produce something real, but now requires a second look.

Early captive Sumatran rhinos, 1641 to 1984
According to the aptly titled book The Rhinoceros in Captivity: A List of 2439 Rhinoceroses Kept from Roman Times to 1994, the first Sumatran rhino known to be kept in captivity was in 1641. It was housed in Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, when the region was a powerful sultanate. Two hundred years would pass before another Sumatran rhino was recorded as being brought into captivity.

During the 19th century, 37 animals were brought into captivity, including two sent to the Barnum & Bailey circus in the U.S.; one of them died within a year, the other survived just five.

In 1889, an even more notable event occurred: a Sumatran rhino that had been living at Calcutta Zoo for several years successfully bred in captivity, the first we know about. At the time, Calcutta Zoo, India’s oldest, was run by an ahead-of-his-time biologist, Ram Brahma Sanyal, who wrote a hugely influential handbook on captive care and breeding. The calf, a male, lived to the age of 14.

Things slowed down considerably over the next half-century, likely due to the two world wars and an increasingly small population of animals (though one rhino did somehow end up in Osaka, Japan).

The next major coordinated effort to capture Sumatran rhinos was an expedition in 1959 to Sumatra led by Switzerland’s Basel Zoo and Denmark’s Copenhagen Zoo. According to the 1964 book Rhino Country by Hakon Skafte, the expedition was the brainchild of Svend Andersen, then the director of Copenhagen Zoo. Andersen told Skafte that what he most wanted was a specimen of “the hairy Sumatran rhinoceros.”

An expedition was launched to an unprotected forest near the Siak River in Riau province. Skafte described it in a 1962 article as “one of the most exciting big-game safaris imaginable.” Skafte and Arne Dyhrberg, also from Copenhagen Zoo, had local men encircle known rhino trails with a 10-by-10-meter (30-by-30–foot) palisade fence with six trap doors that would fall when a rhino entered.

Improbably, the first rhino arrived with an unexpected guest: a Sumatran tiger, which eventually escaped the trap unharmed. But the rhino didn’t survive. In his book, Skafte blames local workers for poisoning her due to a dispute over pay, though he offers no real proof. However, the team soon managed to catch another female, which they named Subur. They sent her to cold Copenhagen, where she lived on a diet of hay, carrots, apples and potatoes (for days en route she ate only rice balls). Miraculously, despite her odd diet, she survived 13 years in Denmark.

The expedition caught three more females after Subur. One died before it could be transported. The other two both died in 1961, one in Basel, the other in Bogor, Indonesia. The expedition did catch one male, but he escaped the trap, making any attempt at breeding impossible.

In the more than 300  years between 1641 and 1984, only 56 Sumatran rhinos had been recorded as being kept in captivity. And by 1980, all of them were dead.

Two Days in Singapore

“We at IUCN consider this a most important occasion, where precedents may be set for other species [in] other regions of the world,” Robert F. Scott, the executive officer of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, said at the opening of the 1984 meeting, according to its carefully documented minutes.

It is clear from the minutes that many participants believed the decisions made regarding the Sumatran rhino could have far-reaching impacts for other species. If zoos and conservationists could succeed in captive breeding of this species, then they could do so for other nearly extinct species. It was an exciting time for zoos, at the time undergoing a major transformation from facilities largely viewed as amusement for people into institutions that could make a serious contribution to conservation. Captive-breeding programs were already ongoing for species like the Arabian oryx and the golden lion tamarin, both of which would prove successful in decades to come. The zoos hoped that a Sumatran rhino captive-breeding program could help prove zoos’ conservation worth.

But not everyone was in favor of a captive-breeding program for the Sumatran rhino.

“More people were against captive breeding but a small core group went ahead,” says Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan, then the head of the Asian Rhino Specialist Group as well as the Malaysian Wildlife Department director, who attended the meeting.

The most outspoken critic of captive breeding proved to be Rudolf Schenkel, a rhino expert with Basel Zoo (but perhaps best known for his research on captive wolves). According to the minutes, Schenkel repeatedly and effusively argued against captive breeding, saying that an animal in captivity “loses its ‘meaning’ and ‘dignity’” due to its disconnection from the ecosystem in which it evolved.

“He was dead against capture. It’s like a mantra for him,” says Payne, who noted that Schenkel put a “damper” on parts of the meeting. “But everyone sort of politely overruled him.”

A baby Sumatran rhino, born in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo, displays the species’ characteristic shaggy fur. Transferring rhinos to zoos in the West was a controversial move, but one that proved critical for the program’s success. Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo.

There was also considerable debate over whether captive breeding should be restricted to Malaysia and Indonesia, which still had surviving Sumatran rhinos, or whether U.S. and U.K. zoos should get a crack at it too. Keeping the animals in an environment to which they were accustomed was, of course, a key argument. But national pride also played a role.

Still, the argument for sending at least some pairs abroad would win out partially — and fatefully, as it turned out. The reason to do so, articulated by Foose, from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, included the experience of zoos in the U.S. and Europe in caring for other rhino species and their general expertise at captive breeding and management, as well as cutting-edge research into “reproductive technology including artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and cryopreservation.” The interested zoos included some of the best in the world, from San Diego to Cincinnati to the Bronx Zoo.

Bringing Sumatran rhinos to the U.S. would also give “wider recognition and support for the species,” Foose said.

This graphic shows the locations where wild rhinos were captured in the inner ring of the chart. The outer ring shows the locations where the rhinos in the program are currently or were at the time of their death. Chart by Willie Shubert for Mongabay.

At one point in the discussions, according to the minutes, Warren D. Thomas, the director of Los Angeles Zoo, “elaborated on reasons and realities why self-interest of zoos must be considered.”

This point is tantalizingly left at that, but one can imagine that Thomas must have pointed out that if the zoos involved were to put significant amounts of money into the program, they would want a return on their investment, i.e. living Sumatran rhinos at their institutions. The zoos were not only willing to pay for capture and transportation, but also to sponsor increased on-the-ground conservation efforts. Much of this had already been hammered out: both the early agreements between the AZA and Sabah and Aspinall’s Howletts Zoo and Indonesia included technical and financial assistance.

“The debate … was actually much less than expected,” said Nardelli from the Sumatran Rhino Project. “The Indonesian and Sabah government representatives were already convinced to proceed with a captive-breeding project.”

During the meeting, Aspinall brought up the case of the kouprey as a cautionary tale.  He noted that while there had been “many” conferences on the forest ox from the Southeast Asian mainland, they had all resulted in zero action.

“The kouprey is now reduced to 10-20 and only a miracle can save it,” he told the meeting.

It was an apt point. The last confirmed sighting of a kouprey came in 1983, a year before the rhino meeting. It’s now assumed extinct.

Over the two-day meeting, the participants appeared to take Aspinall’s point to heart. Though they could disagree, and they frequently did, they didn’t walk away with nothing to show for it.

“Actually, it was a very good discussion,” Payne said.

In the end, the group agreed to the captive breeding of Sumatran rhinos, both in-country and abroad, for animals with “no hope of survival in the wild,” what they often termed “doomed” animals. This meant only taking animals from populations too small to survive in the long term or in habitats already slated for clear-cutting.

It was a choice that would have a longstanding impact on the program’s success.

The meeting also agreed on not mixing the three known subspecies of Sumatran rhino until more taxonomic work was done to understand the differences between them — another decision that would have considerable impact. To date, the subspecies have never been mixed, though; scientists now say it should be done if at all feasible.

The group also agreed to set up a new organization to oversee the efforts and coordinate between the various countries and institutions. This would eventually become the Sumatran Rhino Trust, an organization that would only survive until 1993.

The meeting lasted two days, and anyone who has ever attended such an event might wonder if the most important conversations actually happened over lunch, tea and late-night drinks. But nonetheless, they walked away with a consensus plan.

Foose must have been ecstatic.

Five months before the meeting in Singapore, an incredible event had taken place in Peninsular Malaysia. A half-blind female Sumatran rhino had wandered into an oil palm plantation. She was caught by workers, tied up and surrounded by hundreds of locals. Khan says he had to race to the site to beat “animal dealers” already en route.

Jeram, pictured here tied to an oil palm, was the first Sumatran rhino taken into captivity since the early 1960s. She was found in a palm oil plantation in Peninsular Malaysia in 1984 and was nearly handed over to poachers, but wildlife officials got there first. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan.

“I couldn’t believe it was really a Sumatran rhinoceros,” Khan told the media at the time. “I was worried the animal might die of fright and more worried it might be chopped up and exported before we got there.”

Amazingly, Khan got there first, and Jeram, as she came to be known, survived the ordeal. Khan and his team rapidly built a crate, and by midnight they were transporting her to Malacca Zoo.

By the time of the meeting, then, Peninsular Malaysia already had one rhino in captivity, the first one caught in a quarter-century. And conservationists were confident they could catch more animals now and breed the hell out of them.

But the whole thing turned out to be much more complicated than anyone could have ever guessed. Within just 10 years, the meeting in Singapore would come to resemble a drunk driver getting into a car — barely able to make out the road ahead but certain they would arrive home just fine.

After her capture in Peninsular Malaysia, Jeram lived 18 years in captivity in the Malacca Zoo and is believed to have died from old age. She was the first of a capture program that would last over a decade and catch 40 rhinos. Image by Mohammed Khan bin Momin Khan

Read the original article on Mongabay 

The seemingly “disastrous” story of the world’s most endangered mammal – the northern white rhino – could be rewritten by IVF, scientists claim.

They used the method to produce rhino embryos with sperm from two dead males.

The embryos were made using eggs from a closely related sub-species, but the scientists say the method could save the northern white rhino.

One of the team said he hoped a baby that’s fully northern white rhino would be born “within three years”.

This could provide a way of “rescuing valuable genes” from a sub-species that is already functionally extinct; the last male northern white rhino, named Sudan, died earlier this year at the age of 45.

Only two females now remain, but the researchers who carried out this project say their carefully-developed method of assisted reproduction could work with eggs harvested from those two precious animals.

How do you carry out rhino IVF?

In the journal Nature Communications, Prof Thomas Hildebrandt, from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, and his international team of colleagues, described the complexities of safely extracting an egg, or oocyte, from a two-tonne female rhino.

“You can’t reach the ovaries by hand, so we developed a special device,” Prof Hildebrandt explained to BBC News. “We used ultrasound to very precisely inject a needle into [the area of the ovary that releases] eggs.”

This was done while the female southern white rhino was under general anaesthetic, but the process is still very risky. Very close to the ovaries, Prof Hildebrandt explained, is a “huge artery” that if punctured would probably cause the rhino to bleed to death.

But once viable eggs were safely preserved, the team then had the challenge of fertilising them with sperm from male northern white rhinos – animals that died several years ago. They injected each egg with the sperm and used pulses of electrical current to stimulate the egg and sperm to fuse.

The result – viable embryos containing genetic material from a sub-species that is already functionally extinct.

“Everyone believed there was no hope for this sub-species,” said Prof Hildebrandt. “But with our knowledge now, we are very confident that this will work with northern white rhino eggs and that we will be able to produce a viable population.”

Could this bring back the northern white rhino?

These researchers think so, and others around the world who have been involved in efforts to save the northern white rhino say it is an important step.

But Dr Terri Roth, from Cincinnati Zoo, said the team’s suggestion that they would have a “new baby on the ground” within three years was “optimistic”.

“Embryo transfer [into a surrogate mother] in rhinos is in its infancy and has not yet been successful in any rhino species,” Dr Roth told BBC News.

“And there are just two female northern white rhinos alive today, so acquiring white rhino [eggs] will be challenging and their number will be limited. Any embryos produced would likely need to be cryopreserved (or frozen) until a surrogate could be set up.”

Why are there so few northern white rhinos left?

As Dr Roth explained, poaching is the primary threat facing all rhino species.

“The most effective way to save rhinos from extinction is to stop the poaching, however, that has proven difficult,” she told BBC News.

“In the late 1990s, even the wild northern white rhino had a chance to recover from low numbers until civil unrest broke out in the DRC and the rhinos were all killed.”

Loss of habitat is the other primary threat to rhinos, and conservationists say that governmental protection of parks and reserves is now essential.

“The proper legislation must be passed, the resources to enforce the regulations must be provided and the law must be upheld,” said Dr Roth, who has worked in rhino conservation for more than two decades.

“It is important that we learn from the plight of the northern white rhino and we make sure what happened to it does not happen to other endangered species.

“As impressive as science can be, we should not reach a point where these hi-tech approaches are the only source of hope for rescuing genes of valuable individuals, sub-species or entire species.”

Read the full BBC News article by Victoria Gill, Science reporter

DNA of northern white rhino — of which only two remain — mixed with that of close subspecies in a bid towards growing population using surrogates.

Fatu, one of the last two northern white rhinos, lives in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.Credit: Nichole Sobecki/The Washington Post/Getty

Researchers have created hybrid rhino embryos as part of a ‘Hail-Mary’ attempt to rescue the northern white rhinoceros from all but certain extinction.

The embryos — which have now been frozen — contain DNA from northern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) and a close relative subspecies and could be implanted into surrogates to yield animals that are a mix of both. The work is reported in a Nature Communications paper published on 4 July¹.

The research “is an impressive step forward for the whole field”, says stem-cell biologist Jeanne Loring, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Her team hopes to use stem-cell technology to repopulate the rhinos.

A victim to poaching, the northern white rhino population is now down to only two females, making it the planet’s most endangered mammal. Earlier this year, Sudan, the last male of the subspecies, died of age-related disease (although his sperm has been preserved). His daughter Najin and her daughter, Fatu, live in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Najin has leg injuries that prevent her from becoming pregnant, and Fatu has fertility problems that prevent embryos from implanting into the womb.

Innovation versus extinction

Extinction of the northern white rhino would seem inevitable. However, a team led by Cesare Galli, a veterinarian and embryologist at Avantea, a biotechnology laboratory in Cremona, Italy, may have given the animal a second chance. Galli and his colleagues have developed a technique to extract eggs from female rhinos and fertilize them to generate viable embryos potentially capable of becoming animals.

Rather than test the procedure — which involves a risky anaesthetic — on Najin and Fatu, the researchers collected eggs from 12 southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum simum), a closely related subspecies whose numbers stand at around 20,000 across southern Africa.

The hybrid embryos were created with eggs collected from southern white rhinos and northern white rhino sperm.Credit: T. B. Hildebrandt et al./Nat. Commun.

Of 13 eggs injected with sperm from a now-deceased northern white rhino, four developed into blastocysts, or early embryos. These ‘hybrid’ blastocysts, which contain genes from both subspecies, can be frozen and later implantated into a surrogate to produce hybrid offspring. These hybrids could ensure that some of the northern white rhino DNA would be preserved.

The researchers injected 17 other eggs with sperm from a southern white rhino, to produce three ‘pure’ southern white rhino blastocysts.

To test the health of the blastocysts, the team generated stem-cell lines from two of the pure embryos. These showed all the signs of healthy embryonic stem cells, suggesting that the embryos from which they were generated would be viable once implanted.

Expand and diversify

The next step will be to harvest eggs from Najin and Fatu, fertilize them with northern white rhino sperm and implant the resulting embryos in a southern white surrogate — with an ultimate goal of having the first northern white rhino born within three years.

However, the offspring of this effort would lack the genetic diversity to sustain a healthy wild population of northern white rhinos, says Galli. A better, but more challenging, avenue is to use frozen tissue from a wider pool of northern white rhinos to generate stem cells that have the capacity to develop into eggs and sperm (see ‘Saving the Northern White Rhino’).

In 2011, Loring and her colleagues produced such cells, called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, from Fatu’s skin². Since then, Loring and her team have created 4 more iPS cell lines from northern white rhino tissue stored at San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research in California.

In May, the researchers showed that this tissue — which comes from 12 male and female rhinos — contains enough genetic diversity to help save these giant animals³. “We expect to have cells that look like sperm and eggs in a year,” says Loring, “but there are still many challenges ahead.”

Humans versus nature

“It would be fantastic to see the northern white rhino back in its natural habitat,” says Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. However, he is concerned that the underlying cause of the rhinos’ near-extinction has not been dealt with.

“Let’s celebrate this endeavour, but keep it in perspective,” Pimm says. “We still live in a world in which we have lost an enormous number of rhinos to poaching, and if we have any chance of putting their descendants back into the wild, we’ll have to prevent them from being killed the moment they’re released.”