Rhinoceros cow under anesthesia for egg retrieval
Photo: Rio / Ol Pejeta Conservancy / BioRescueSPIEGEL: For the third time in Kenya you have removed egg cells from the world's last two northern white rhinos. How did the procedure go?
Hildebrandt: "Najin", the older female, has a large tumor on the ovaries, so the anatomical conditions are even more difficult than usual. Nevertheless, we were able to obtain two good quality eggs from her. We took eight egg cells from her daughter "Fatu". We will now try to use the frozen sperm from already dead rhinoceros to make embryos from this.
SPIEGEL: Is that the same process as in a human fertility clinic?
Hildebrandt: Not exactly. Our patients weigh two tons. They have blood vessels the size of children's arms. The needles that we developed ourselves are almost two meters long. We have to remove the egg cells through the intestine with endoscopic instruments, which is not found in any other animal species.
Thomas Hildebrandt is a veterinarian and reproductive medicine specialist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin
Photo: BioRescueSPIEGEL: Doesn't sound safe.
Hildebrandt: It sounds worse than it is. We have done this over fifty times with southern white rhinoceros cows. We have already treated a patient five times and could not find any damage to her. We developed this procedure years ago as a zootechnical measure for animals that were excluded from natural breeding, for example because they had fertility problems or were suspected of tuberculosis.
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