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Northern White Rhino: Only Four Left In The World After The Death Of Nabire

By Lindsay McCane
Published on: 23:07 PST, Jul 29, 2015

There are only four northern white rhinos left in the world after the Czech zoo in Dvur Kralove reported that the 31-year-old female rhino Nabire died on Monday evening due to a ruptured cyst.

Nadire was born at the zoo in Nov. 15, 1983, and lived their until her death on Monday, July 27, according to the New York Daily News.

“The pathological cyst inside the body of Nabire was huge. There was no way to treat it,” said Ji?í Hrubý, a rhino curator at the zoo.

While Nadire suffered from reoccurring cysts, conservationists hoped to be able to harvest eggs from her healthy left ovary to use for in vitro fertilization (IVF). They made one successful attempt while she was still alive, and upon her death, her ovary was removed and sent to a specialized lab in Italy.

“Her death is a symbol of the catastrophic decline of rhinos due to a senseless human greed. Her species is on the very brink of extinction,” Premysl Rabas, the zoo director, said in a statement, BBC News reports.

After Nabire’s death, only four northern white rhinos remain:Nola, an elderly female living at a zoo in San Diego, California, and Sudan, an elderly male living with two females, Najin and her daughter Fatu, on the Ol Pejeta reserve in Kenya.

In 2009, the Czech zoo moved the four rhinos to Kenya, hoping that the natural environment there would help them to breed. However, this plan sadly failed. The new plan is to implant the embryos from the northern white rhinos into their more plentiful closely-related Southern White Rhino.

[Photo via Shutterstock]

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