Tuesday saw the coming together of 3 organizations in a team effort to take rhino conservation to the next level. We worked alongside our own vet Dr Pierre Bester and Dr Johan Marais from @savingthesurvivors to help our beautiful Kolisi and with Dr Morne de la Ray & Dr Hendrik Hansen from @rhino_repro on two other orphans, Lia & Nyani, in an effort to secure a future for black and white rhinos through assisted reproduction procedures in the form of oocyte collection.
For the very first time, Dr Morne (a specialist in fertility and reproduction) and his team attempted to aspirate oocytes from a female black rhino. To Dr Morne’s knowledge this has never been done anywhere in the world and although we didn’t get any oocytes from Lia this time round, valuable information was gathered whilst she was under anesthesia for the procedure. White rhino Nyani, on the other hand, took everyone by surprise and delivered 2 oocytes during her collection procedure. Furthermore Nyani has been given a hormonal treatment in preparation for artificial insemenation in two weeks time. To date the AI procedure in a white rhino has not delivered a succesful pregnancy yet, so we have all fingers & toes crossed for Nyani. Why do we do this?
Rhino Repro’s mission through The Northern White Rhino Project is to save the most endangered rhino species in the world from extinction, the northern white rhino. And we are so proud to have a small part in this by making rhino available so the techniques can be perfected.
Tuesday was truly a great day for all the organizations and we are so happy to have Kennedy from @councilofcontributors at the orphanage too and now part of our rhino family.
These veterinarians are truly the best at what they do and we as a Team are so privileged to learn from them and assist them with their projects. As an organization cannot stand alone in the fight against extinction but stand proudly with #sts #rhinorepro & #CoC.