What can be about 6 feet tall, weigh more than a Honda sedan and turn up in the news for a month or more? (Hint). Last known address was San Diego. (Next hint). Misnamed. (Third hint). Vegan. Fourth hint. (White) Guess again. It’s the Northern White Rhinoceros, AKA and familiarly called just a Rhino. Until recently, they happily roamed a host of African countries, munching the grass on the savannas. Now that the last Alpha male has died, laboratories are busy creating fertility clinics for the few remaining White Rhino females. The most confident of these specialists is hoping for success within three years, despite the fact that those females are Southern White Rhinos. Even so, they have enough in common with their Northern sisters to make them possible surrogates for a new supply of male calves. At birth, rhinos weigh about 270 pounds, so they probably shouldn’t be called puppies.
With remarkable foresight, the San Diego Zoo has frozen White Rhino sperm for the experiments. Obviously, this cache is relatively recent, because the last male survivor died in March 2018. In comparison to the experiments with woolly mammoth fossils found in Siberia and Alaska, creating a Northern White Rhino sounds far more promising than attempting a woolly mammoth from the Pleistocene era. Their heyday might have been up to a hundred and twenty thousand years ago. Even if those efforts succeed in producing a few, they would just languish in zoos—not even a politically correct word anymore. The newer term is Zoological Garden, to avoid demeaning the inhabitants by calling a zoo a zoo.
Thousands of the vanished white rhinos have been poached for their horns, and that’s worlds away from poaching a pheasant by stealing and roasting it. They’ve been brutally murdered because their horns, after being ground into powder, are more valuable than gold. For centuries, Asian medicine has depended on rhinoceros-horn powder for a long list of disorders, although not the one most people think of first. Rhinoceros- horn powder doesn’t have the legendary Viagra effect often attributed to it. The peer-reviewed articles by eminent biological scientists don’t even include that in their lists of treatable problems. Though the medical history of rhino horn-powder includes everything from hangovers to cardiac arrest, enhanced virility seems to be a myth.
So-called white rhinos aren’t white, like Lipizzaner horses. Rhinos can’t be taught to dance. They’re hopelessly klutzy. Nor are they white like Poodles or Samoyeds, beautiful and eager to be stroked and admired. Apparently, the word that best describes them comes from wye, applied to them in Afrikaans Dutch but mistranslated as the English word white. In fact, the white rhinos are recognizable only for their wide jaws; not the better to eat you with but the better to gobble meadow grass. They can be mud-colored from their frequent mud baths, or if rained upon, gray like all other Rhinos.
Most safari-goers wouldn’t get close enough to see much difference between Northern, Southern, or Black rhinoceroses, which aren’t black either, just Rhino gray. The difference is just the shape of their jaws. Only a dental veterinarian could notice that at once.
Sadly, the “The embryo transfer procedure has yet to be developed and validated in rhinoceroses”. The researchers are obliged to work with hybrid embryos while they hope to use the same petri dish technique to produce northern white rhino embryos. Those, of course, would have to be male. The process might actually take more than three years if the surrogate southerners produced only females. The last two female northerners are in the Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic, and permission to obtain their eggs has not yet been granted to the research team at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. Even so, Thomas Hildebrandt of that institute still has his three-year goal, and is prepared to go to Kenya to collect eggs from southern specimens, and with luck, the offspring will resemble the square-jawed sperm donors more than their narrow-jawed mothers.
Here, in the US, Terri Roth, director of the Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, is not quite so optimistic. “There are many, many steps from the petri dish to a calf on the ground”, and so far, “we’ve really struggled to just produce two-cell embryos”. It could be an extremely long wait. Terri Roth believes the odds are low for the calves and could mean generations of hybrid herds before a pure-bred white rhino emerges.
Rhinos communicate with a variety of sounds; grunting, growling, snorting, squeaking and bellowing. Perhaps we’re closer to having a male White Northern Rhino that anyone expected. Maybe we already have one, in a surprisingly ready-made habitat. Just follow the grunting, growling, snorting, squeaking and bellowing clues.