Longleat's rhinos playing crucial role to save sub species
Three females part of ground-breaking work to save northern white rhino
Last updated 23rd Nov 2021
A trio of female rhinoceroses at Wiltshire's Longleat Safari Park are helping in a desperate race against time to save the northern white rhino from extinction.
There are just two of the sub species left in the world who live under armed guard in Kenya.
A team of international scientists is attempting to stop them disappearing forever by using assisted reproductive technologies and stem-cell associated techniques with the help of Longleat's southern rhinos.
Eggs collected from Razina, Ebun and Murashi are being used to trial an IVF surrogacy programme which will be tested with southern rhinos in Africa.
If successful scientists will attempt implanting 12 pure northern rhino embryos, which have been fertilised with frozen sperm from deceased males, into southern surrogates.
The project aims to effectively resurrect the northern white rhinos’ dying bloodline.
Longleat is the first UK-based zoological collection to be involved in this ground-breaking project, with a number of other zoos in mainland Europe also participating.
The northern white rhino is a subspecies of white rhino, which used to range over parts of Uganda, Chad, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Years of widespread poaching and civil war in their home range have devastated northern white rhino populations, and they are now considered to be extinct in the wild.
If the treatment proves successful it is hoped it could also be used, alongside conservation programmes, to help boost numbers of other highly endangered species.