The last male northern white rhino has died. Known as Sudan, after months of poor health. He was 45 years old.
Sudan鈥檚 death means there are only two northern white rhinos left on the planet. Both are females, so cannot breed. It would seem the species is doomed to extinction.
But perhaps we could bring them back. Plans are afoot to create new northern white rhinos from samples of stored tissue kept in freezers.
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The trouble is, this is almost entirely pointless.
Rhino extinction
Northern white rhinos () are one of two subspecies of the white rhinoceros. The other subspecies is the southern white rhino (), which lives in southern Africa and is doing much better, .
The plan to save northern white rhinos involves creating embryos using egg cells from the remaining females and stored sperm from the last few males. There is also a more technically challenging proposal to take other stored tissue and change it into stem cells, which can then make both sperm and eggs.
These embryos would be implanted in,聽as the remaining two northern white rhinos are too vulnerable to risk on an experimental pregnancy.
There are plenty of potential pitfalls for this scheme. Much of the technology is unproven, so the failure rate will be high. That also makes it expensive. And crucially, we only have tissue samples from a handful of northern white rhinos, so the resulting population would have little genetic diversity 鈥� leaving them vulnerable to disease.
Deadly threat
But the biggest problem is that right now there is nowhere for them to live. The remaining two northern white rhinos live at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, where Sudan spent his last few years. They are under 24-hour armed guard because poachers seek to remove their horns and sell them on the black market.
The same threat would await a population of artificially created northern white rhinos if they were released into the wild. Of course, we could keep them in zoos, but this sets hard limits on the potential population. Only a handful would remain, just like now. The species would be on life support, barely a step up from simply keeping tissue samples on ice.
Besides, even if we put a stop to poaching, in the coming decades the rhinos will face another threat. African cities are expanding and wilderness is being cut back, so the rhinos鈥� potential habitat is shrinking.
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Home on the rhino range
That last point is the crucial objection to artificially reviving northern white rhinos, at least for now. The money we would need to spend on artificially reviving northern white rhinos could instead be used to protect a swathe of habitat in central Africa.
This would help save thousands of species, not just one subspecies of rhino. And then, in a few years鈥� or decades鈥� time, when a vast expanse of protected wilderness was ready and waiting, we would have a happy choice to make.
We could move some southern white rhinos into that habitat, and leave them to evolve. Separated from their fellows, they would start to change, becoming a new kind of rhino that has never existed before. We don鈥檛 know what they would be like, but they would surely become just as unique and wonderful as northern white rhinos were.
Or, if we so chose, we could use our technological powers to bring northern white rhinos back to life 鈥� and set them free.
