The Rhino’s Battle for Survival and the Players Like Colossal Biosciences Dedicated to Its Protection

Rhinos are among the world’s most recognizable and beloved animals, attracting thousands of visitors to zoos and safaris annually.

While rhinos have been long admired for their majestic charisma and ecological importance, ongoing illegal poaching, which has killed upwards of 10,000 rhinos in the past decade, may cause us to lose rhinos within our lifetime and has put three out of five rhinoceros species at risk of extinction. Some experts even report that rhinos may go extinct from South Africa — the country with the world’s largest rhino population — by 2036.

With rhinos in desperate need of conservation, many organizations — including Colossal Biosciences — are stepping up to the plate. Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology and genetic engineering startup best known for its efforts to revive the woolly mammoth, recently announced that it will be utilizing the same technology involved in the de-extinction of the mammoth to revitalize the critically endangered northern white rhino, a species down to its last two individuals. 

African Poaching Explained: The Misfortune of Misguided Medicine

According to Save The Rhino International, a nonprofit organization devoted to saving all five rhino species from poaching and extinction, the current rhino poaching crisis began in 2008 and reached a peak in 2015 before seeing a significant dropoff due to increased protective measures and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

While Africa-wide poaching numbers — reported as approximately 548 rhinos poached last year —- have decreased dramatically since the continental peak of 1,349 in 2015, there’s still a massive way to go in preventing the loss of these precious species, considering at least one rhino is killed by a poacher each day.

Historically, rhinos have been hunted for sport throughout Africa since the colonial era. However, current poaching is largely driven by the demand for rhino horns as a common ingredient in traditional Asian medicine in China and Vietnam. 

There’s no proven medical value to rhino horns, but evidence suggests they’ve been used for over 2,000 years as an aphrodisiac and a cure for ailments raining from fever, rheumatism, and gout to snakebites, hallucinations, typhoid, headaches, carbuncles, vomiting, and food poisoning. Rhino horns are made of keratin, the protein found in fingernails and hair, and traditionally ground into a powder before being dissolved in boiling water and drunk as a tea.

While the international trade of rhino horns has been banned by The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora since 1977, in 1994 the white rhino’s CITES classification was downgraded from an Appendix I to an Appendix II in South Africa, making the international export of rhino horns legal for those received in legal noncommercial hunts.

Unfortunately, with the demand for rhino horns being independent of their price and white rhinos being the most docile (and therefore most poachable) rhino species, the CITES downgrade was wholly taken advantage of and white rhino horns began to flood black markets in Asia. From 2007 to 2014, rhino poaching in South Africa — the country with the largest rhino population worldwide — grew exponentially by over 9,000%.

The northern white rhino, with populations already decimated by wars ranging throughout its habitat, was particularly devastated by the spike in international horn trading. By 2008, the subspecies was considered extinct in the wild and was hanging on from complete extinction due to six individuals living at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya as part of an ongoing captive breeding program conducted by the Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic. 

Today, the northern white rhino is considered the most endangered mammal on Earth.

The northern white rhino now consists of two individuals, females Najin and Fatu, who are unable to breed naturally but are faithful participants in advanced conservation efforts involving the use of their eggs for in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy. 

As two of only 27,000 rhinos throughout all five species on Earth, the northern white rhino’s story and the conservation efforts made toward saving it represent one of thousands of attempts made at conserving rhinos around the globe.

Global Rhino Conservation and Its Importance

An undoubtedly iconic species with a disproportionately large impact on its ecosystem, the rhino has become the subject of innumerable conservation efforts, with worldwide organizations dedicated to its protection.

The International Rhino Foundation is one such enterprise that conducts a variety of conservation efforts to protect all five rhino species, including restoring their habitats, conducting captive breeding, reducing the demand for rhino horns, and working with local communities to support conservation. 

Recently, the IRF provided critical funding to the Lowveld Rhino Trust in Zimbabwe. This trust funds rhino-based conservation education for students in 55 primary schools surrounding the Bubye Valley Conservancy, home to one of the largest herds of black rhinos in all of Africa. The hope is that through education, Zimbabwe’s next generation will see rhinos as beneficial to their community. 

And their benefits are undeniable. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, ecotourism contributes $29.3 billion to the African economy and employs 3.6 million people. With the rhino a favorite for African safaris, the loss of just one of the five species could result in a 20% decrease in African ecotourism.

As one of the Earth’s few megaherbivores, rhinos also provide major benefits to their ecosystems, which is why they’re considered keystone species. Not only do rhinos shape their landscapes through grazing and the creation of mud pits, but they also nourish their ecosystem through their dung, which feeds everything from dung beetles to mongooses and crested guineafowl.

Colossal Biosciences: The Key to Saving a Keystone Subspecies

Colossal Biosciences may be best known for its focus on de-extinction projects, but as a company fervently dedicated to the protection of keystone species, its recent partnership with BioRescue to save the northern white rhino should come as no surprise. 

BioRescue is a consortium led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, which is dedicated to using advanced breeding techniques to revive the northern white rhino population. Since its founding in 2019, the consortium has been working on harvesting eggs from the living northern white rhinos to create embryos using sperm from now-deceased male individuals. 

The consortium has hopes of using its embryos to impregnate two surrogate southern white rhinos by 2025, but it faces concerns over embryos potentially containing disadvantageous attributes due to having low genetic diversity from years of captive breeding. 

To address BioRescue’s concerns, Colossal Biosciences will sequence the genome of the northern white rhino using preserved samples of bones, dry skin, organs, and fetuses. Once sequenced, the northern white rhino’s genome can help Colossal and BioRescue determine if there are any lost genes that can benefit the future population. 

“The northern white rhino is the world’s rarest large mammal and thousands of species are interlinked to its existence,” explained Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt, BioRescue’s project head. “With Colossal’s advanced genetic technology, we will be able to piece together the missing links of the species’ genetic history.”

Colossal additionally plans to use its technological spinoff company FormBio to conduct a population study of the southern white rhino. Using its comparative genomic tool, FormBio intends to look for additional genes in the southern white rhino that aid in the subspecies’ survival and status as the most abundant rhino, with a population nearing 20,000 individuals.

Using the novel gene-editing technology that Colossal co-founder George Church helped perfect, the company will insert any newly discovered genes into the cell lines used to create northern white rhino embryos. This will improve the embryo’s chances of survival in the womb and into life and keep BioRescue on target toward birthing the first northern white rhino calf by 2025. 

Regardless of the outcome of Colossal Biosciences and BioRescue’s partnership, any effort toward conserving the rhino is an act of solidarity with an animal continuously plagued by hardship and threats of extinction despite its immense charm and undoubtable importance. 

As Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm stated in a press release, “We’re very honored to be BioRescue’s genetic rescue partner and have the opportunity to help save the northern white rhino, as well as other iconic keystone species from the brink of extinction.”