This is Fatu.
Scientists are inserting a two metre long device into the female rhino
to collect her immature egg cells.
Fatu and her mother Najin are kept under guard 24 hours a day.
Because they are the only two northern white rhinos left in the world.
The window to keep their species from going functionally extinct
to fully extinct is closing fast.
And there's just one last glimmer of hope.
Artificial reproduction.
But how does this work?
A rhino's life mission has always been peaceful:
to eat plants and reproduce.
Without many predators, they flourished for millions of years.
But humans put an end to that
by hunting them down and destroying their habitat.
One rhino species in particular is doing worse than all the others:
the northern white.
In 2008, the IUCN officially declared
the northern white rhino to be extinct in the wild.
Now, there are just two females left:
Fatu and Najin.
But a group of experts created a plan to bring the species back from extinction.
The leader of the international "BioRescue" project is Professor Thomas Hildebrandt
from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.
BioRescue's artificial reproduction is now the last glimpse of hope
for the northern white rhino.
But let's start at the beginning.
Around 50 years ago,
poachers began illegally hunting thousands of rhinos across Africa for their horns.
This, combined with civil wars and habitat loss,
decimated the northern white rhino population.
Conservationists were concerned
and began to breed them in captivity in the 1970s.
This involved collecting and storing semen from different males.
Only a few rhinos were ever born through the breeding program.
The last two, Najin and her daughter Fatu, have become famous.
Sadly, neither of them can have a calf.
Najin's hind legs are too weak and Fatu has a degenerated uterine lining.
On top of that, the worst possible scenario happened.
Sudan, the last male northern white rhino died in 2018.
This left no living males and no females able to carry a pregnancy.
And so the species was deemed functionally extinct.
But Thomas Hildebrandt and his team are doing the unthinkable
and creating viable embryos in the lab.
It all starts with the extraction of immature eggs.
Our patient is nearly two tons.
That means the ovaries are quite far inside the body of ths rhino.
We had to develop a totally new approach.
It is a device which is inserted into the rectum.
Then we go in about two metres through the rectum
and find then the ovaries, which are deep inside the abdominal cavity.
Then we have to use and needle which is bended about 80 degress.
So we actually shoot around the corner
to aspirate the follicles.
The reproduction laboratory "Avantea",
which is also part of the BioRescue consortium,
perfected a technique for creating viable embryos from these egg cells.
On August 22 2019,
Najin and Fatu's eggs were extracted and flown to this lab.
Three days later, the eggs were fertilized
with preserved sperm from male northern white rhinos.
After another week, two of the eggs had made it to the stage of development,
when the embryo can be frozen and preserved for the future.
In 2019 and 2020, three more embryos were created,
bringing fresh hope that the species could be saved from extinction.
At the moment there are a total of 5 pure northern white rhino embryos in the world.
They are stored in liquid nitrogen.
To freeze an embryo for a long time,
you have to stop any life functions.
You have to freeze it instantly to a level that has no metabolic activity
and no enzyme is active.
And that means -196 degrees Celsius.
They can then store liquid nitrogen for more than 100 years.
The next step is to find promising surrogate mothers.
Northern and southern white rhinos diverged about a million years ago
into separate, though still closely related species.
They inhabit different regions and have slightly different physical traits.
But pregnancy is the same length for both of them.
And so researchers are optimistic
that a southern white rhino can carry a northern white rhino embryo to term.
The BioRescue team hopes to be able to deliver
its first northern white rhino calf soon.
Internally discussed, the early start could possibly be at the end of this year.
We want to produce a calf as soon as possible
so the social knowledge or the experience Najin and Fatu have,
can be transferred, can be taught.
The scientists think they can collect Fatu's eggs for the next five years.
But they aren't sure about Najin.
She's already thirty two and also has a tumor.
It's a race against time.
The goal is to actually repair some of the severe mistakes
the human population has done a few decades ago
by causing the extinction of this charismatic, two tons heavy animal
which was the the dominant species in this swamp area in Central Africa.
The rhino didn't fail in evolution.
It is not a process that a species gets extinct
because it isn't adapted to the environment and factors anymore.
It is only not bulletproof because people shot it.
We have the responsibility as scientists to fix some of these severe mistakes.
I think it is really important that science can be used
to make our planet better for the next generation.