Sudan the Northern White Rhino's Health

Sudan has sadly now passed away.He had to be put down due to ill health and old age.The last two remaining Northern White Rhino's under armed guard,are his daughter and grand-daughter.The only hope will be through in-vitro fertilization through the surrogacy of Southern White Rhino's. It is so tragic that it will be likely the last two ladies will slip away into history and extinction before a pure bred NWR is brought back.So sad. Such is the barbaric murderous greed for Rhino horn (and Elephant ivory),people don't realise what we've lost until it's too late..Gone the way of the Thylacine & Passenger Pigeon..
 
This is terrible. We need to be able to prevent this from happening to the Sumatran and Javan rhinoceros as they are some of the next candidates. Truley a dark time for conservation.
 
I just opened that article and I was greeted with blachk rhinos being labelled as Javans.
 
PaleoMatt said:
Now is the perfect time to highlight the Sumatrans in the media, that will get them more attention.
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100% only thats NOT what the IRF are doing. I saw an interview the other day on the BBC with the president, who missed every single opportunity handed to him by the reporter.
 
This death has been extremely well-documented on social media. Lots of my friends have been writing about it and my Facebook has been inundated with links to different articles.
This is raising awareness, albeit a tad late to make any difference to this particular taxon. :(
 
Brum said:
This is raising awareness, albeit a tad late to make any difference to this particular taxon. :(
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It might not be too late. One article I saw mentioned possibly using some of Sudan's stored sperm. Did anyone else hear about this?
 
I read that this was always the plan, although they did not have the financial resource to do so at this point. Has the money since been found?
 
With only 2 females I don't know if IVF could even lead to a stable population.
 
Plus the two remaining females are his close relatives - daughter and granddaughter. That would be one very inbred population
 
PaleoMatt said:
With only 2 females I don't know if IVF could even lead to a stable population.
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Crowthorne said:
Plus the two remaining females are his close relatives - daughter and granddaughter. That would be one very inbred population
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Sperm and eggs were harvested back in 2014 when there were still 4 females living, so two may not be related to him?

From what I understand the plan is to implant these in to surrogate southern white rhino when techniques have improved to have a better chance of success.
 
Because there is a suitable surrogate in the SWR, the actual safest thing now for this taxa is to just allow it to go extinct, safeguard the southern (sub)species and revisit the whole situation in a decade or so when the technology is more developed and certain of success.

With the Indian rhinos being very likely suitable surrogates for Javan's, i'd really love I'd to see a program to start curating a bank of genetic material from the current wild javan population also.... but fat chance getting the belligerent Indonesian government to do anything but nothing!
 
Welsh Zootographer said:
Sperm and eggs were harvested back in 2014 when there were still 4 females living, so two may not be related to him?

From what I understand the plan is to implant these in to surrogate southern white rhino when techniques have improved to have a better chance of success.
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Have just rewatched the BBC Natural World special about Sudan and that implied that the only genetic NWR material comes from 4 males (one of which is Sudan) and 2 females (the surviving females Najin and Fatu)

The episode is currently available on the iPlayer
 
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