World’s first IVF rhino pregnancy could save species

The critically endangered northern white rhinoceros could be brought back from the brink of extinction after scientists successfully transferred a lab-created embryo into a surrogate mother.

At present, there exist only two infertile female northern white rhinoceros on Earth as a consequence of illegal poaching – fuelled by the demand for rhino horn – which has wiped out the wild population across central Africa.

They have been under 24-hour armed protection at a conservation site in Kenya since the last remaining male died in 2018 and the disappearance of the species began looking imminent.

A recent scientific advancement has provided a glimmer of hope that the pair may not be the last of their kind, however.

Achieving a huge breakthrough in the years-long effort to save the animal from extinction, an international team of researchers from BioRescue has just performed the world’s first-ever successful rhino pregnancy using in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

The process involved transferring a lab-created embryo into a surrogate mother of the closely-related southern subspecies. Because they’re so similar, say researchers, this has paved the way for the method to be used for its rarer northern counterpart.

‘To achieve the first successful embryo transfer in a rhino is a huge step,’ says Susanne Holtze, a scientist at Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, which is part of the BioRescue project.

‘But now I think with this achievement, we are very confident that we will be able to create northern white rhinos in the same manner and that we will be able to save the species.’