Rhino Expecting Again

A Cincinnati Zoo rhinoceros whose groundbreaking pregnancy resulted in a stillborn calf in 2008 is expecting again.

If all goes well, next October the zoo will celebrate the world's first live birth of an Indian rhino conceived by artificial insemination. It would also be the first such calf produced using frozen and thawed sperm.

Nikki, an 18-year-old, 3,950-pound rhino on indefinite loan from the Toronto Zoo, is 133 days into a 480-day gestation period.

"It looks great. We have high hopes," said Monica Stoops, reproductive physiologist for the zoo's Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife, or CREW. She's the scientist who developed the techniques that made such a pregnancy possible.

Vinu, a 38-year-old Indian rhino at the Bronx Zoo, is the father. His sperm was collected in 2005 and stored for four years at 320 degrees below zero in CREW's CryoBioBank. The sperm was thawed for the artificial insemination procedure in June.

Stoops was confident the procedure would work because it had been successful before, in 2006. That time, Nikki experienced a normal pregnancy, but 492 days into it, on Jan. 5, 2008, she delivered a stillborn female calf.

"We knew there was a large chance that could happen because she was an older female having a baby for the first time," Stoops said. "As we've seen with all the stud book records we go through, all the females that have had stillborns with their first calf go on to have successful second births. That makes us feel really good."

Ideally, Stoops said, the zoo would breed the animals naturally. But male Asian rhinos - which include Sumatran and Indian rhinos - are extremely aggressive and are known to injure the females.

There are 60 Indian rhinos in captivity in North America, the zoo said. Cincinnati has no males and one other female, but "she has not been able to carry a calf," Stoops said. That female is expected to be replaced by another female from the Wilds, a wildlife conservation preserve in southeastern Ohio.

Successful breeding is important in maintaining the genetic diversity necessary to keep the population healthy.

The Indian rhino is one of five rhino species. It is listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of threatened species.