Sudan died in 2018, and with him went the last hope that the northern white rhino could survive on its own. 🦏
For decades, poachers pursued this subspecies for a reason as simple as it was perverse: its horn is worth more than gold on the black market.
They hunted them, destroyed their habitat, and pushed them to the brink of the abyss, leaving only two specimens alive: Najin and her daughter Fatu, both females, now protected at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy reserve in Kenya.
Without a living male, nature can no longer do its job. That’s why scientists speak of functional extinction: technically, they still exist, but they cannot reproduce on their own.
An international team called BioRescue is now attempting the unthinkable — creating embryos in a laboratory with Fatu’s eggs and frozen sperm from males that are no longer alive, so that another rhino species can carry them to term. It’s the last card left to an animal that human greed has nearly erased from the planet. 🌍
