Can We Save Animals From Extinction?
Tyrone Chen ‘27
Earth has had no shortage of mass extinction events with 5 of these events already happening before humans came to exist. The scary thing is that experts think that we are currently in the sixth extinction event, caused by humans. Human activity, pollution, climate change, and various other factors have caused this to happen and one effect of this is the mass extinction of various animals by the human hand. Various efforts such as poaching laws, conservation efforts, and captive breeding have been made to try and slow down this extinction event, but one intriguing new effort being made is IVF or In Vitro Fertilization.
In Vitro Fertilization orIVF for short is a method of fertilization where a female egg is fertilized by a male egg in a lab setting and this fertilized egg is then implanted into a surrogate. IVF has had plenty of success in various animals like humans and even cows with a pregnancy rate of 65%, but it has never been successfully performed on a rhino until recently. Though IVF is a procedure that has been done before, it offers various difficulties in other animals due to the varying biologies of even similar animals like horses and donkeys. This procedure gives a new ray of hope for conservation efforts in this modern extinction event.
Ever since the last male northern white rhino, Sudan, has died, this species has been on the brink of extinction. With Sudan’s and various other dead rhinos sperm being frozen for the slight chance of revival, that hope has been answered. Recently the first successful IVF has been performed with the frozen sperms and a baby embryo was successfully transplanted to a surrogate mother. Though the mother has perished due to an infection unrelated to the transplant, this proof of concept for a embryo transplant for rhinos offers hope in the preservation of this species.
With clear evidence that a rhino embryo that was frozen and thawed can produce life, IVF procedures can be applied to various other species that are endangered such as tigers, elephants and sea turtles. In this delicate dance between science and nature, we can only hope that IVF offers a way for humanity to correct their wrongs and one day save the very species that they have endangered.