High Hopes and Extreme Plans to Save Northern White Rhinos

Happy birthday, Edward! This spunky one-year-old celebrated his birthday with quite the party. Decorations. Cards pouring in from friends. Colorful presents. A mud-pit and hay treats. Wait, what… mud-pit? Hay treats?

Your birthday party might include a bounce house and a triple-decker cake with thick frosting, but for Edward, a southern white rhino, it’s all about rolling in the mud and snacking on hay.

Edward celebrated his first birthday in July 2020 at the San Diego Zoo in southern California. “Even though he doesn’t know it’s his birthday, it is very special to see Edward—a healthy, robust rhino—running around, enjoying his special treats,” shared Barbara Durrant Henshaw, the Director of Reproductive Sciences at the San Diego Zoo. “We aren’t just celebrating his birthday but also are celebrating the significance of his birth.”

A SCIENTIFIC SUCCESS

So, what was special about Edward’s birth? Edward was the first southern white rhino born through artificial insemination in the United States. Artificial insemination is when doctors directly inject male sperm into a female’s body. Veterinarians at the San Diego Zoo artificially inseminated Edward’s mother, Victoria, with frozen sperm from one of the zoo’s male rhinos. Sixteen months later on July 28, 2019, baby Edward was born.

Over 12,000 rare and endangered animals captivate visitors at the San Diego Zoo. But behind closed doors, there is a zoo of another kind—San Diego’s Frozen Zoo. Since 1975, the zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research has collected animal tissue and used this tissue to grow cells in a lab. The collection of animal cells is stored in five steel tanks, each about the size of a washing machine, at -321 degrees Fahrenheit. That is two times colder than the frigid temperatures of Antarctica.

The Frozen Zoo in San Diego has the world’s largest collection of animal cells with cells from over 10,000 different species, according to CBS. They hope to use these cells to save endangered animals and even bring back nearly extinct species, like the northern white rhino.

ONLY TWO LEFT

On the continent of Africa, two different subspecies of white rhinos roam the grasslands, the southern white rhino and the northern white rhino. As their names suggest, southern white rhinos live in southern Africa while northern white rhinos live in central Africa. Southern white rhinos are considered “near threatened” which means they could become an endangered species in the future. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), about 18,000 live in the wild.

For the northern white rhino, the situation is far bleaker. On March 19, 2018, Sudan, the last male northern white rhino in the world, died. With Sudan’s passing, only two female northern white rhinos remain—Najin and Fatu. Both ladies live at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya and are protected by seven-foot fences and armed guards.

With a weight of 5,000 pounds, the white rhino is the third largest land mammal, behind the African elephant and hippopotamus. Despite their enormous size, northern white rhinos are known as gentle giants and are the most social of the rhino subspecies. Sadly, the desire for rhino horns led to the mass killing of northern white rhinos. Rhino horns are worth about $3,000 per kilogram, but can sometimes fetch up to $60,000. With two horns that weigh about 2.5 kilograms each, rhinos have a price tag on their heads between $15,000 and $300,000. Poaching and the illegal sale of rhino horns drove northern white rhinos to extinction in the wild.

HOPE FOR THE NORTHERN WHITE RHINO

Edward and the San Diego Frozen Zoo offer hope for northern white rhinos. Edward showed that artificial insemination could produce a healthy baby rhino, so scientists believe that they can use a similar process to save the northern white rhino.

In the wake of Sudan's death, scientists preserved some of his sperm, which they hope to use for breeding northern white rhinos. But the process is more complicated than Edward’s artificial insemination. The last two female northern white rhinos are too old to have babies, so scientists can not use artificial insemination to inject Sudan’s sperm into them. Instead, scientists must extract their eggs and fertilize these eggs with sperm in a lab. This fertilized egg is called an embryo. Scientists hope that these embryos can one day be implanted in the womb of a southern white rhino. So Edward’s mom could give birth again, but this time to a lab-created embryo of a northern white rhino.

Scientists are also planning for another complication in the “save the northern white rhino” project. With no more male rhinos and only two aging females, they have limited access to rhino sperm and eggs. So scientists are working to create sperm and eggs in a lab. Scientists are taking cells from rhinos’ skin and transforming them into stem cells. Stem cells are cells that have the ability to grow into other kinds of cells. Scientists hope that they can manipulate rhino stem cells into sperm and eggs. From here, they would pick up the process of creating an embryo and putting the embryo inside of a southern white rhino.

But, not all scientists are on board with this extreme plan to bring back northern white rhinos. They question whether humans should manipulate the natural world, literally creating babies in a laboratory. Thus, Edward’s birth using science and technology holds both hope and questions for the future of the northern white rhino.