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The northern white rhino may be able to avoid extinction for a while longer. Fertilised northern white rhino eggs are set to be implanted in rhino surrogates this year in the hope of producing offspring.

鈥淭here is still some hope left that we can save the white rhino species,鈥� says Thomas Hildebrandt at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, who is part of an international team working to do just that. However, time is not our side, he says.

The last male northern white rhino, named Sudan, died in March 2018. The only remaining northern white rhinos are two females 鈥� Najin and her daughter Fatu, both of which live in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a non-profit organisation and protected wildlife area in Kenya.

In 2019, Hildebrandt and his colleagues at Ol Pejeta retrieved 10 eggs from Najin and Fatu. These were then fertilised using a technique called intracytoplasm sperm injection with sperm from Sudan. The process resulted .

White rhinos are split into two subspecies. There are northern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), the last of which live in Ol Pejeta Conservancy, and southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium聽simum simum), which live in southern Africa. Southern white rhinos are faring much better than their northern counterparts and currently number about 20,000. However, both are at risk from poaching. The northern white rhinos are under 24-hour armed guard.

The team now plans to implant the embryos from Najin and Fatu in southern white rhino surrogates. This could happen in the next few months, but it may take longer, partly because of impacts from the covid-19 pandemic. The gestation period of a southern white rhino is between 16 and 18 months.

鈥淲e hope to implant very soon as we are now more sure than ever that it will work,鈥� says Hildebrandt. 鈥淚n the next few months, we hope to have a major announcement.鈥�

鈥淚nsemination will take place as soon as possible in the near future, but before 2022,鈥� says Elodie Sempere at Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

Other methods are also being worked on to save the northern white rhino from extinction. The success rate of embryo implantation is unlikely to be high, so the team is trying to create hybrid embryos too, using southern white rhino eggs and stored northern white rhino sperm.

A third option being explored is taking stored cells from some of the last northern white rhinos and converting them into stem cells. These stem cells could then be used to make both sperm and eggs. However, this technology is unproven.

Even if attempts are successful, the resulting northern white rhino population will have a very low genetic diversity because the samples all come from a few individuals. This could make the population vulnerable to disease.