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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The world's last surviving male northern white rhino has died after months of poor health, his carers say. Sudan, who was 45, lived at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. He was put to sleep on Monday after age-related complications worsened significantly. His death leaves only two females - his daughter and granddaughter - of the subspecies alive in the world.
"His death is a cruel symbol of human disregard for nature and it saddened everyone who knew him," said Jan Stejskal, an official at Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic, where Sudan had lived until 2009. "But we should not give up," he added in quotes carried by AFP news agency. "We must take advantage of the unique situation in which cellular technologies are utilised for conservation of critically endangered species. It may sound unbelievable, but thanks to the newly developed techniques even Sudan could still have an offspring."
[...] Sudan, who was the equivalent of 90 in human years, was the last surviving male of the rarer variety after the natural death of a second male in late 2014.
[...] Sudan's genetic material was collected on Monday, conservationists said, to support future attempts to preserve the subspecies. The plan is to use stored sperm from several northern white rhino males, and eggs from the remaining younger females, and implant the embryo in a surrogate southern white rhino.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 23 2018, @11:53PM
Listening to the convoluted plans for surrogate parenthood reminded me of a friend's finch breeding operation. You know the ViewSonic finches? Very colorful, but apparently they don't breed very quickly - so, to run a competitive commercial finch breeding operation what you do is get a few of the expensive colorful breeding pairs, and then a bunch of the cheap as dirt Society finches. When the pricey finches lay an egg, you steal it from their nest, causing them to lay and fertilize another one more quickly, and give the egg to the Society finches to hatch and raise... Weird enough yet? Even weirder, the finch-feed had a high egg content, obtained from domestic laying hens. The daily feeding routine was to collect the chicken eggs, cook them up and blend with the other finch-feed ingredients, then feed all the finches, check progress of which ones have laid, hatched, etc. Oh, and keep the whole birdhouse something like 78F year round (crucial mistake they made was not insulating the bird house, was costing them >$400/month in the winter to heat it...)
After about 18 months of being a literal slave to the grind (grinding up the hen's eggshells to go into the feed...) the appeal wore off and they sold the business.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end