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.”

SAN DIEGO – Victoria, a southern white rhino at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, is pregnant. It’s an event of vital importance for a program to bring back her nearly extinct kin, the northern white rhino.

The developing baby is also a southern white rhino, conceived on March 22 through artificial insemination. The pregnancy is a dress rehearsal for the ultimate goal of creating more northern white rhinos, grown from embryos made from stem cells.

The lengthy rhino gestation period means the baby isn’t due until the summer of 2019. A failure would mean more work needs to be done, or that the female is infertile.

Only two northern white rhinos are alive today, both females. The last male, Sudan, died in March in a Kenya preserve. Another white rhino, Nola, died in November 2015 at the Safari Park. She was one of four alive at that time.

Credit: AP PHOTO

Victoria and five other female southern white rhinos at the Safari Park’s Nikita Khan Rhino Rescue Center have been conditioned for years to willingly accept the most intimate handling, such as ultrasound examination of their reproductive tracts.

Jeanne Loring, a stem cell scientist at The Scripps Research Institute, has worked on this project with the zoo for years. She expressed delight in the news.

“That’s awesome,” Loring said from Germany. “It’s an amazing feat. This is a milestone.”

Much of the rhino reproductive system hasn’t been studied before, she said. So the zoo and allied researchers like Loring have had to invent the technology as they go along.

View the related video here.

The project’s roots go back decades to a dream inspired by Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at San Diego Zoo Global, the zoo’s conservation arm.

Ryder suggested deep-freezing tissue from endangered animals, in the hope that future technology could recreate whole animals from these cells. He established a cryobanked collection of tissue from these animals, known as the “Frozen Zoo.”

The technology to put these cells to use finally arrived in 2007. Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka demonstrated that adult mammalian cells can be turned into artificial embryonic stem cells. He shared a Nobel Prize in 2012 for his discovery.

Loring is leading a separate project to use the cells to treat Parkinson’s disease. These induced pluripotent stem cells, as they are called, are to be created from the patients themselves. They will be matured into brain cells of the type destroyed in Parkinson’s, then implanted into the patient’s brains.

The rhino project is even more complicated. Thawed cryopreserved tissue will be converted into the artificial embryonic stem cells, then matured into egg and sperm cells. These will be united by in vitro fertilization to create an embryo. This is what will be implanted into the southern white rhino surrogate mothers.

Loring and Ryder are co-authors of a recent study describing how stem cells were produced from four northern white rhinos with a method they say is superior. Unlike earlier methods, it doesn’t use viruses to deliver genes that help convert the cells. So the cells created have a healthier genetic profile.

The study, which has yet to be published, can be found at j.mp/rhinostem.

The Safari Park says the work may be applicable for other rhino species, including the critically endangered Sumatran and Javan rhinos.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency

This article appeared in VC Star on 18 May 2018. Read the original online article here. 

The little-known and smallest member of the rhinoceros family, the Sumatran rhinoceros, is critically endangered. Today between 30 and 100 are isolated on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo in Southeast Asia. In a new study, researchers urge conservationists to translocate the two island groups–representing two subspecies of the Sumatran rhino–and to create a cell bank to preserve the genetic diversity uncovered by this work.

“It is heartbreaking as a geneticist to recommend that two subspecies, which are probably as different as humans were from the Neanderthals, should be combined into a single conservation unit,” said Al Roca, a professor of animal sciences in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois.

The Sumatran rhino is the smallest of the remaining rhino species, but it is critically endangered — with 100 or fewer left in the wild today. Photo credit: Terri Roth

Published in the Journal of Heredity, the study analyzed 13 samples taken from zoos and the wild as well as 26 museum specimens to reveal differences in the species’ mitochondrial DNA, the small proportion of the genome that is passed down only from mothers to their offspring.

The study exposed 17 distinct mitochondrial haplotypes, a group of genes inherited from one parent, that can be used to trace a species’ migrations and distribution across thousands of years. The mitochondrial DNA also confirmed the classification of three subspecies of Sumatran rhinos: D. s. lasiotis (likely extinct), D. s. harrissoni, and D. s. sumatrensis.

In the wild, Sumatran Rhinos are solitary creatures, only coming together to breed. In such few numbers, it is increasingly difficult for them to find each other in their mountainous habitat. What’s more, if they are not able to mate, females develop reproductive diseases that prevent them from successfully breeding.

“My strongest recommendation is that they are brought into breeding centers as soon as possible because they aren’t going to survive in the wild in such low numbers,” Roca said. “A population of 10 individuals loses 5 percent of their genetic diversity each generation, which they cannot spare.”

“Unfortunately, at this point, we have to act quickly and risk losing unique genetic lineages in order to save a whole species,” said first author Jessica Brandt, now a professor of biology at Marian University.

This genetic erosion can be prevented, or slowed, by combining the remaining rhinos to create a larger population. A century of captive breeding efforts have yielded few babies, but recent successes suggest ex situ breeding facilities could help save this species from the brink of extinction–the result of poaching and habitat loss due to legal and illegal logging for desirable hardwoods.

To ensure the long-term genetic health of the species, the authors implore conservationists to preserve the genomes of every living Sumatran rhino. In the future, preserved cell lines could be used to create artificial gametes, to reverse the effects of inbreeding and harmful mutations.

“We may one day be able to use stored cells to bring back what was once lost, reversing the effects of inbreeding, drift, and our own folly,” Roca said. “Because they are at such low numbers, every single living Sumatran rhino is genetically very valuable, and preserving cells with genetic material from each surviving individual is of paramount importance.”

Read the original article here.

This work was made possible by the United State Fish and Wildlife Service Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Fund, the International Rhino Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Science and Engineering Research Council (Canada), and ACES Office of International Program.

The paper “Genetic structure and diversity among historic and modern populations of the Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis)” is published by the Journal of Heredity(doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esy019).

Co-authors also include Peter J. Van Coeverden de Groot (Queen’s University in Canada), Kelsey E. Witt (University of Illinois), Paige K. Engelbrektsson (National Museum of Natural History), Kristofer M. Helgen (University of Adelaide), Ripan S. Malhi (University of Illinois), and Oliver A. Ryder (Institute of Conservation Research, San Diego Zoo).

The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology research facility at the University of Illinois is dedicated to transformative research and technology in life sciences using team-based strategies to tackle grand societal challenges.

This Op-Ed by Jeremy Hance appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 17 March 2018.

There could be as few as 30 Sumatran rhinos left in the wild.
Photo: Jeremy Hance

In Rudyard Kipling’s classic story of how the rhino got his skin, the titular character is an unmannered lout. This is how the public imagines rhinos: aggressive, dumb and grumpy – charge first, ask questions never. But in 2010 when I met my first Sumatran rhino, a fellow named Tam, he whistled at me like a curious dolphin and rubbed his horn against my shirt like a cat. I’ve been in love ever since.

The Sumatran rhino is arguably the most imperiled large terrestrial mammal on the planet. Indonesia – where the last of the species survive – says there are 100 left in the wild. But the real number may be closer to 50 – and it could be as bad as 30. I’ve been told by some conservationists it’s too late for this species, but as someone who’s had the pleasure of spending a few precious hours with Sumatran rhinos I’m not ready to throw in the towel.

Sumatran rhinos are lovably weird. It’s as if Mother Nature combined a big pig, a yak, and an oversized dog. Then, as a joke, she stuck a couple horns on her creation. Unlike other rhinos, Sumatran rhinos sport a coat of hair, sometimes resplendently red. They are small – compared with other rhinos ­– but large compared with most everything else. And they are the most vocal of all the rhinos – they sing like whales and snort and puff in a manner that says “hello, I’m hungry”. They are nearly constantly chattering. Dumb? Hardly.

Evolutionarily, Sumatran rhino are unlike any other rhino on earth. They belong to an ancient genus – Dicerorhinus – that split off from other rhinos around 25 million years ago ­– long before we ever walked the earth. Researchers also believe they may be the last living relative of the famous woolly rhino.

But why should we spend effort and money on trying to save a species when we may fail in the end? There are number of practical reasons.

The multitude of species – called biodiversity – underpins every ecosystem on earth and humans won’t survive without functioning ecosystems. Every species play a role. Little ecological research has been done on the Sumatrans rhino, but we can make some guesses. When Sumatran rhinos make wallows, they likely create habitat for smaller species. When they poop, they deliver important food sources for nature’s cleaners like beetles and fungi. And when Sumatran rhinos eat – and they eat a lot – they can change the understory of the forest.

When we lose a species – any species – we are essentially taking a brick out of the foundation of life on Earth. How many bricks can we lose before the walls start coming down?

But I don’t really care about all these arguments, no matter how convincing. We should save the Sumatran rhino because we can. Humans have become the dominant species planet-wide: we are altering the climate, razing forests and acidifying the oceans. We are bending the ecology of the Earth in ways that would have been unimaginable just 50 years ago. So, we have a moral obligation to do whatever is possible to mitigate any damage and save as much life on our little planet as possible, small or large, grumpy or chill.

Despite how close Sumatran rhinos are to extinction, there is one bright spot. The Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary, located in the island’s Way Kambas National Park, has produced two hairy, big-eyed babies in the last six years – Andatu, a boy, and Delilah, a girl. Sumatran rhinos are notoriously difficult to breed – but we’ve cracked that nut.

The solution then according to numerous scientists I’ve talked to over the last year is to bring more Sumatran rhinos into sanctuaries and breed the hell out of them. Make more babies like Andatu and Delilah. There is precedent for this: aggressive captive breeding programs saved both the European bison and the Arabian oryx from oblivion during the 20th century.

The biggest obstacle to doing just this for the Sumatran rhino is the government of Indonesia. Nothing concrete can happen for the species without the government’s approval, but it has dragged its feet for years – wasting critical time. So, I am calling on President Joko Widodo, who is now visiting Australia, to take the initiative and call for a bold, new action plan for the species that goes into effect immediately. Not for ourselves, but for our children and the countless generations to come. Not even for humanity, but because there’s nothing in all the universe quite like the littlest rhino.

Jeremy Hance is a freelance journalist. He recently wrote a four part series on the species for Mongabay.

You can read the original SMH article here

Researchers and conservationists are adamant that the only way to save the Sumatran rhinoceros is a unified captive breeding program that brings scientists, NGOs and governments together.

LAHAD DATU, Malaysia – The rhino breeding center near the entrance to Danum Valley Conservation Area sits like an oasis of calm against the cacophony of beeps, woots and zaps of the surrounding jungle.

So calm it’s eerie, in fact. No one is working on the grounds. There are no animals in the collection of holding pens and chutes. Despite a few spots of rust, the green paint shows none of the wear that would have come with housing cow-size animals. A silent generator sits in the corner, and the whole area is surrounded by heavy cable fencing that’s never been tested.

On a side of the road sits a sign that reads, “THE DANUM VALLEY BORNEO RHINO SANCTUARY, DVBRS.” The text explains that I’m looking at the site of the breeding program for the Bornean rhinoceros, but a parenthetical below notes, “THERE IS NO RHINO IN CAPTIVITY AS YET.”

In the three years since the center’s construction not far from the town of Lahad Datu, the Bornean subspecies (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis harrissoni) of the Critically Endangered Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) has only grown more elusive. Most experts agreed in 2015 that the only ones still living in Malaysia were the three captive rhinos in an enclosure at Tabin Wildlife Reserve, east of the town of Lahad Datu. Sadly, that number is down to two: Puntung, a 25-year-old female captured in Tabin in 2011, had to be euthanized in early June, shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Puntung, a female Sumatran rhino at Tabin Wildlife Reserve in April. Her caretakers discovered that she had cancer in April, which caused a serious abscess in her jaw. Photo courtesy of the Sabah Wildlife Department.
I’d come to Danum Valley in part to follow up on a revelation that one more rhino might still be lumbering around the valley’s old-growth forests. In 2016, a team of scientists announced that they had found something resembling a rhinoceros print in the 438-square-kilometer (169-square-mile) reserve. It touched off a flurry of speculation – mostly by journalists like me – that a remnant population of rhinos may be hiding out in Danum.

But since learning of the possibility, I hadn’t been able to find anyone to tell me more about what it might mean. During a recent trip to Sabah, the WWF scientist who led the expedition turned down my request for an interview. And others scoffed at my naïveté when I brought up the “discovery.”

Footprint or fabrication?

In fact, it seemed that many conservationists believe that this apparition – this potential figment that could have just as easily been from a small elephant as from Borneo’s diminutive, shaggy rhinos – could actually be a detriment to the species’ survival, rather than a sign of hope.

The footprint, publicized at a press conference, crystallizes a decades-old struggle over how best to ensure the survival of these animals. Should managers do all they can to maintain wild populations? Or should they gather the surviving holdouts and help them reproduce?

Those in the latter camp write off the print as a myth that’s skewing the focus – and funding dollars – of conservation away from where it should be.

“The ‘rhino’ is a fabrication,” John Payne told me in an email. “[People] keep doing that.”

A biologist with decades of research and conservation experience in Borneo, Payne took the helm of SOS Rhino, a conservation group now known as BORA, short for the Borneo Rhino Alliance, in 2009. BORA is focused on saving the Sumatran rhino through an intensive breeding program based at the facility in Tabin. 

“There are no wild rhinos left in Malaysia,” he added.

In Payne’s view, such a highly publicized whiff that there might still be hope for wild rhinos in Malaysian Borneo is misleading. A single animal banging around the brush of Borneo means little to the long-term survival of the species, especially given the species’ failure to recover even in protected areas like Danum Valley.

With one or two exceptions in Indonesia, rhino populations just aren’t large enough to harbor the level of genetic diversity necessary for their long-term survival, said Muhammad Agil, a veterinarian and faculty member at Bogor Agricultural University in Indonesia. Once a group dips below 15 individuals, it’s no longer a viable population, Agil said.

The science also seems to indicate that that isolation could lead to reproductive problems.

Those facts should be guiding conservation efforts away from observation of the existing wild rhinos, Agil told me, with fewer than 100 animals scattered throughout the Indonesian forests of Sumatra and Kalimantan in Borneo.

“We don’t need to do surveys anymore,” he said. “We need to do search and rescue for the rhinos.”

The goal of such missions is to bring the animals into an intensive breeding program employing assisted reproductive technology, such as artificial insemination and the harvest of females’ eggs, as the only hope for the most endangered rhinos in the world.

Keeping wild animals wild

The push for intensive breeding isn’t new. Intensive breeding programs that began in the 1980s with 45 individual rhinos have only led to five live births in captivity, and three of those occurred far from the jungles of Southeast Asia at the Cincinnati Zoo in the United States.

But the broader strategy of helping Sumatran rhinos to reproduce hasn’t been immune from criticism. Critics argue that the substantial cash outlay required to keep rhinos in captivity and carry out techniques such as in vitro fertilization would have been better spent on protecting animals in the wild.

More than 20 years ago, Alan Rabinowitz, then a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, strongly opposed the use of finite resources for captive breeding. At the time, Rabinowitz wrote in an essay in the journal Conservation Biology that “viable populations” of rhinos still existed in Borneo and deserved protection. He argued that captive breeding efforts didn’t address the hunting and habitat loss that nearly wiped out rhinos in the first place.

Then, in 2012, Rabinowitz, currently the CEO of the big cat conservation group Panthera, questioned the endgame for captive rhino breeding when threats to wild rhinos still exist for a news story in the journal Nature. That viewpoint still guides many of the rhino conservation efforts, said ecologist Petra Kretzschmar at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.

A Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) calf in Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.

“Today, the main strategy to help save the Sumatran rhinos is protection,” Kretzschmar said. Many funders want to see their money go to protecting wild populations – just as Rabinowitz argued for in 1995 – because they see that as the priority.

But, “It’s not,” Kretzschmar said. “Protection of the habitat is important, but it will not save the species.”

Beyond protection

The idea of keeping rhinos in the wild fits with the ethos of conservation, to keep as many wild animals as possible roaming around their natural habitats, subject to no outside mastery other than their own whims. And perhaps that’s why news that someone found a print is so intoxicating.

I certainly took a sip of that wine, even as the scientists I spoke with told me I might as well be chasing a unicorn. It’s a scene many of us dream of: stumbling upon a remnant of one of the world’s rarest animals, standing healthy and virile in the forest as its ancestors have in Southeast Asian rainforests for millions of years.

If there was anywhere in Malaysian Borneo rhinos would be, I thought, it seems that Danum Valley would be the place, a reserve that some of the world’s most seasoned tropical ecologists speak of only in hushed tones. Imagine flipping through a time-lapse series of rainforest photographs where you can watch the stepwise creep of the vegetation skyward in a slow-motion race for sunlight. It’s a punishing competition, and the decaying biomass all around leaves little doubt about what happens to the losers.

Big animals themselves in the forest are elusive. Within half a kilometer of the Danum Valley Field Centre, however, my guide Dedy points out the fresh mud wallows of boars from the night before and, in another spot, a pungent mix of dung, tracks and broken branches – souvenirs from their recent brush with an elephant herd moving up a creek bed.

Never mind that the ephemeral 700-kilogram (1,500-pound) animal left behind no other signs. And it still seemed unlikely that a rhino would escape the notice of the roughly 100 scientists working in the conservation area at any given time. That absence of a rhino sighting in Danum Valley since 2014 has been misinterpreted, BORA’s John Payne said.

“They think that not finding them means they’re not easy to find,” he told me when we met in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah’s capital city. “They’re easy to find.”

And the wild population’s downward spiral may have been beyond the help of conventional, protection-centered conservation for decades, Payne said, adding, “It should have been blindingly obvious that no rhino populations were demographically viable 50 years ago.”

The decimation of Borneo’s rhinos 

Beginning in the 1930s, people started hunting the Bornean subspecies. Unlike their African cousins, which were (and have continued to be) a favorite quarry of foreign hunters, rhinos in Borneo were targeted from the outset by locals to fuel – then as now – the trade of rhino horn going mostly to China.

It wasn’t long before someone figured out that the island’s rhinos couldn’t withstand this kind of pressure. As early as the 1980s, scientists sounded the alarm that rhinos were at risk of being wiped out and that we needed to eliminate the threats to their survival.

But when conservationists began working to staunch poaching and rhino habitat loss, the numbers didn’t rebound the way that other rhino species had under similar protections, Kretzschmar said, who works in rhino conservation all over the world. Today, Africa’s southern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum simum) stands as a testament to the success of earnest protection: Hunting slashed the population to no more than 100 animals by 1895, but today there are more than 20,000.

A Sumatran rhino calf wallows in the mud while its mother looks on. Conservationists hope to increase the success rate of captive breeding programs for the Critically Endangered species. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.

The Sumatran rhino has followed a different path.

In small populations, maintaining genetic diversity is a concern of course, but so is the chance that they’ll bump into each other. With so few rhinos, “There’s only little chance for the individuals to meet each other,” Kretzschmar said.

This reality seems to be particularly true on the island of Borneo. For all of the spectacular life it supports, the number of large animals Borneo supports is relatively meager. A landmark study in the 1980s revealed that the island’s soils don’t pack the same levels of nutrients found elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and subsequent research postulated that this difference crimps the numbers of big mammals that can survive on the island.

The behavior of Borneo’s rhinos doesn’t seem to have helped the species out very much either, especially as those numbers continued their downward trajectory. As far as we know, they like to keep to themselves, and the desire to breed doesn’t seem to convince them to push those boundaries of solitude.

“It’s all preprogrammed inside them that they will not go beyond their territory to look for a mate,” said Zainal Zahari, a veterinarian with BORA.

In more than 30 years working alongside these animals, he is well-versed in the quirks of Sumatran rhino biology. He and other rhino biologists believe that this isolation, caused first and foremost by the decimation of the species at the hands of hunters and the loss of their forest homes throughout much of the 20th century, has not only whittled away the diverse gene pool that keeps animals healthy. It has also kept the rhinos from finding each other. They think that it has caused the tumors in the females’ reproductive tracts that have thus far made successful captive breeding such an elusive outcome.

The issue may have to do with the animals’ own biochemistry. Female rhinos continue to cycle through estrus whether there’s a bull around or not. If they don’t copulate, biologists think that the “hormone overload” during this time in their cycles, which would ordinarily prime them for pregnancy, might actually be causing these reproductive problems, according to research that identified similar problems in Indian rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis).

All of these issues mean that the remaining rhinos have little chance of reproducing on their own. Right now, in Indonesia, more wild rhinos could be captured and brought into breeding programs, such as the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas National Park, where two rhinos have been born in captivity.

Rhinos without borders 

Zahari notes the tensions that come with working across international borders.

“There is still distrust,” he said. “There is still patriotism.”

Still, BORA’s staff there wants to share what they’ve learned with Indonesia for the sake of the species. The team has made a lot of progress in their understanding of how to keep these animals healthy, he said.

Kretzschmar and Zahari were both heartened by a recent meeting of rhino conservationists in Jakarta, during which the Indonesian government signaled an openness to using artificial insemination, Kretzschmar said.

Muhammad Agil said that a team in Indonesia was poised to share semen collected from one of its captive bulls with BORA in Sabah, once approval from the Indonesian government comes through. They also hope to receive semen from Tam, a bull kept at Tabin. Agil said this sort of sharing between sanctuaries was essential to maintain the genetic diversity of the few Sumatran rhinos left.

Tam is one of only two Sumatran rhinos of the Borean subspecies (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis harrissoni) remaining in Malaysia. Both are in captivity at the Tabin Wildlife Reserve. Photo by Jeremy Hance.

He also reported a better understanding of the fact that scientists, NGOs and governments can no longer keep their efforts to themselves. “It will be more valuable and the success rate will be higher if we can get all of the experts to work together,” he said.

As Kretzschmar told me before the conference, “The most critical and important point to save the Sumatran rhino comes down to communication – communication between governments, but also between organizations.” And everyone needs to come together to pull the animal from the claws of extinction.

“It should be one management plan,” she added.

If the rhino conservation community cannot find a way to share these lessons, “They will make the same mistakes that Sabah did,” Zahari said. “Then the story stops there.”

Now, acting quickly is as important as the willingness on both sides to bring the animals together and create one breeding program to save the species.

“Numbers are dropping,” Kretzschmar said, “and if there is not a speed-up in the process, the whole species is going to be extinct in the next 10 years.”

Payne laments that a single program to save the Sumatran rhinoceros “should have been done years ago.” Like a relic to that missed opportunity, the rhino sanctuary in Danum Valley sits unused, and it seems unlikely that a rhino will ever make its way through the gates there.

The center also represents an obsolete way of thinking, that there should – or could – be separate breeding programs for this imperiled species. Paradoxically, such places, built expressly for the preservation of the species, might create the same conditions that spurred the need for them in the first place.

“It doesn’t help if we have [multiple] breeding centers” that aren’t working together with just a few animals in each, Kretzschmar said. “Then we have isolated populations again.”

Read the full article on Mongabay