9/17/2023 0 Comments White rhinoceros mass![]() ![]() They do not have incisor teeth and instead use their hard lips to crop grass. These conditions are usually met in wooded grasslands. White rhinos require areas of short grass, water for drinking and in which to wallow, adequate bush cover, and relatively flat terrain. The skin is thick, grey, and prominantly folded on the front of the shoulders and on the upper part of the hind limbs. The head is elongated, and the horns are continuously growing: one horn in front, and a shorter one behind. White rhinos have a barrel-shaped body and short, thick-set limbs. This animal, with its territorial behaviour and rather slow rate of breeding, make it a poor colonist, and it is very slow to expand its range. ![]() Knight calls it “hedging our bets”.The White Rhinoceros is not white in colour its name is derived from the Afrikaans / Dutch word "weit", meaning wide, and its manner of feeding has adapted to grazing short grass with a mouth similar to that of the business end of a lawnmower. Crossbreeding will preserve at least some of the genetic traits unique to the northern white. Through traditional conservation mechanisms, that population has now bloomed to some 25,000 rhinos. ![]() Once thought to be extinct, in 1895 a population of fewer than 100 individuals was discovered in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. The southern white is a conservation success story. Knight advocates pursuing a “fall-back policy” – crossbreeding the northern white rhino with its southern cousin. “If you want to make the best contribution to conserve rhinos in Africa, we should be securing the landscape and making sure those 25,000 rhinos on the landscape are breeding as fast as they possibly can.” “What are we moving towards, some sort of virtual conservation?” says Michael Knight, chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s African Rhino Specialist Group. We need to retain the opportunity to do that." National parks may want to bring rhinos back. "We don't know what the situation will be like in central Africa in 4,000 years. “But mankind is responsible for the dramatic situation of the northern white rhinos and with the knowledge we have in our hand we might be capable, and I’m fairly confident we are, of saving the species, of not losing them.” “It requires a lot of resources,” he says. In October, Hayashi’s team in Japan transformed mouse skin cells into eggs in-vitro and then used those eggs to birth healthy pups, a scientific first.Īlthough, in theory, this technique could be applied to other critically endangered mammals, Hildebrandt doesn’t think this cellular-based approach to conservation should be routine. In 2011, a team at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, created iPS cells from the younger female rhino’s skin. Though difficult, this objective might not be far off in real terms. These cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), have the capacity to develop into any type of tissue, including eggs and sperm, which could be used to produce gametes. Their aim is to transform skin cells from the living animals and from tissue samples kept in cryonic storage into stem cells. So, for step two of the scheme, Hildebrandt is collaborating with Katsuhiko Hayashi, a reproductive biologist at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. Thomas Hildebrandt, head of reproduction management at the Leibniz institute, says he is “quite confident” that the goal will be achieved soon. So far the team has reached the zygote stage of embryonic development next is the blastocyst. Once the embryo reaches the relatively stable blastocyst stage, it will be implanted in a surrogate southern white rhino, a sister subspecies, who will carry the northern white calf to term. First, a team of scientists at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, along with international specialists, are attempting to grow a northern white embryo in-vitro, using oocytes, or eggs, from the two living females and frozen sperm. Perhaps due to the abject hopelessness of their situation, northern whites are at the centre of a daring effort to arrest what seems inevitable: to bring them back from the brink. Since 1900 about 70 mammals are believed to have gone extinct, along with some 400 other types of vertebrate. In this moment of climactic disruption, poaching and urban expansion, species are lost all the time, of course. Since 1900 about 70 mammals are believed to have gone extinct, along with some 400 other types of vertebrate ![]()
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