The New Year brought tragic news for the Yangtze giant softshell turtle. Yangtze giant softshell turtleĪrtificial insemination of a Yangtze giant softshell turtle It’s much more about saving those genetic traits that allow rhinos to live in central Africa.” 3. “To me, it’s not really about saving the species anymore. Given the dire situation, the second option is more likely and promising, Vignes says. The offspring would be hybrids but many of the northern white rhino genes would be saved. The second option is to use sperm from northern white rhinos to fertilise the eggs of the southern white rhino – a closely related species. And a female rhino’s cervix is corkscrew-shaped, meaning traditional ways of extracting eggs simply won’t work. The first involves IVF – but this has never worked in any rhino. “He’s just too old and decrepit and his back legs are not in good enough working order.”Ī couple of options are being discussed. Aged 41, the male, called Sudan, “wouldn’t be able to mount”, says Richard Vignes, CEO of Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the animals are kept. The male and two females are under armed guard day and night in their 600-hectare enclosure in Kenya, but they can’t breed. We now know there are three individuals left. By 2008, the subspecies was thought to be extinct in the wild. As poaching increased in central Africa in the 1980s, political turmoil mired conservation efforts. The northern white rhino was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Vet attempts to artificially inseminate a white rhino As with giant pandas (see below), cheetahs that are deemed genetic matches don’t necessarily want to mate. That helps, but it’s not a complete solution. To minimise inbreeding in captivity, males and females can have their genome sequenced and be artificially paired. Cubs frequently die before reaching adulthood. Today, the survivors have low sperm counts, increased susceptibility to disease and wonky skeletons. Cheetahs survived, but only just.Įxtinction loomed again in the 20 th century because of hunting and habitat destruction – 100,000 cats became 10,000, divvied into isolated populations. At this time most of the large megafauna – giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves – succumbed to extinction. This doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of inbreeding, a hangover from the Pleistocene, some 10,000 years ago. After sniffing where a female has urinated, a male will bark if she is ready to mate. To overcome this, Crosier and her colleagues use males as “on heat” detectors. “They have what we call a silent estrus,” says Adrienne Crosier, head of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s cheetah breeding programme, meaning they don’t signal when they are ready to mate. The main problem? Females are too secretive. Since the first captive cheetah cub was born in 1956 at Philadelphia Zoo, very few breeding programmes have managed to mimic its success.
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