Nola, endangered northern white rhino, dies at San Diego Zoo

The 41-year-old rhino had recovered from a surgery where veterinarians removed an abscess on her hip in January.

The world’s three remaining northern white rhinos are in a guarded area in Kenya.

“We are completely devastated by this loss, but concluded to fight even harder to #EndExtinction”, the park wrote in a Facebook post, including, “let this be a warning of what’s occurring to wildlife everywhere”.

The San Diego zoo recently took possession of six female southern white rhinos – which now number at just over 20,000 – from South Africa.

Barbara Durrant, a reproductive physiologist at San Diego Zoo said that “The reproductive system of rhinos is very complex…much we do not know”. After a long time battling old age and her disease and with all medical care, Nola became more ill last week. The species is widely considered on the brink of extinction, after having been hunted down to miniscule numbers by poachers primarily for their horns. According to Rawstory, there are two females and one male but Sudan (the male rhino) is way too old to reproduce sexually.

If fertilisation is successful, they’ll transplant the embryo into the closely related southern white rhino in the hopes of carrying a baby to birth.

The zoo is working with the sanctuary in Kenya to try to save the species. She was relocated to the park in San Diego to mate.

She was the zoo’s only northern white rhino and had been a resident there since 1989.

SIMON LAUDER: The Western Black Rhino was declared extinct just a few years ago.

“We have DNA from about a dozen northern white rhinos in our frozen zoo, and we are now looking at some way to use the newly developed artificial reproduction technologies to see if we can’t come up with a way to bring the northern white rhino back”, Simmons said.