The last male Northern White Rhino dies at the age of 45

There were only three Northern White Rhino’s on the planet last year, when I visited Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy in August 2017: one male and two females. Now there are only two females left. Sudan, the male died on Monday 19 March 2018 at the age of 45.

The two females remaining are Sudan’s daughter Najin, and his granddaughter Fatu. Both females are in-bred and are not capable of reproducing naturally.

So, in April 2017 he sought love on Tinder, the dating network. Respondents who were interested in him were asked to donate to artificial breeding research in order to save the species. The only way to save the Northern White Rhino was through articifial insemination of the eggs of the females with stored sperm from Sudan and other males. The fertilized eggs would then be implanted into females of the Southern White Rhino, which is a close relative.

There are two subspecies of the White Rhinoceros: the Northern White Rhino (on the verge of extinction) and the Southern White Rhino (increasing in numbers due to breeding programs around the world). There are now about 20,000 Southern White Rhinos in the wild.

Sudan was captured by trappers in 1975, when he was two years of age, and moved to Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic. In 2009, he and three other Northern White Rhinos — Najin, Fatu, and an unrelated male, Suni—were moved to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya to take part in a breeding program. It didn’t work. Even when the rhinos mated, none of the females were pregnant. In 2014, Suni died.

There is still hope for the Northern White Rhino. Scientists have perfected the technique of artificial insemination using Sudan’s stored sperm and trying to fertilize Najin and Fatu’s eggs in a laboratory. Another possible approach involves taking frozen cells from Sudan and other Northern White Rhinos, transforming them into stem cells, and transforming those into sperm and eggs.

In both scenarios, the resulting embryos would have to be implanted back into a surrogate mother — this hasn’t been done before. Even if that works, the Ol Pejeta Conservancy estimates that it would cost about $9 million to create a viable breeding herd of Northern White Rhinos. “Yet this is the hope for preserving an entire subspecies,” said a spokesperson of the Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

In the photographs I took in August 2017, Sudan is the behind the two females. The three Northern White Rhinos were in a separate fenced area in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy that was highly secured and guarded, in order to deter poachers and to protect the last of the species.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).