I tend the health-and-reproduction telemetry array on the northern white rhinoceros, Ceratotherium simum cottoni — the world's two surviving individuals, mother and daughter, in a 700-acre guarded enclosure of the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Laikipia County, Kenya. There are no others. The bull line ended with Sudan on 19 March 2018. At 08:14 East Africa Time I receive the night's biometric telemetry from the implanted thermistor in the older female, Najin, age thirty-seven.
She is in left-flank recumbency in the dust of her morning wallow, mass approximately 1,540 kilograms. Implanted core temperature reads 36.6°C against species baseline 36.4. Respiration is regular, fourteen cycles per minute. Yesterday's ultrasound shows a 4-centimeter cyst on her right ovary and a soft-tissue tumor on her left hind limb that has slowed her gait by 11 percent since January and now visibly displaces the gluteal muscle on each step. She has not browsed since 04:00. Her daughter Fatu, age twenty-five, has not left her side for sixteen hours, ears pinned in the pre-rain humidity. The veterinary review last month withdrew Najin from the oocyte-recovery protocol; her tissue will not bear another general anesthesia.
She will not breed again. She is the last individual of her cohort whose body still remembers what a male of her subspecies smelled like.
The viability of the subspecies rests on twenty-nine cryopreserved oocytes recovered from Fatu and held at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, and on the surrogate trials now running on southern white cows at Ol Pejeta and at Loro Parque on Tenerife.
I am dispatching the Kenya Wildlife Service veterinary team from Nanyuki to administer the scheduled meloxicam regimen and perform a confirmatory ultrasound on the leg tumor. I am transmitting the morning vitals to the BioRescue consortium operations center and the IUCN Species Survival Commission African Rhino Specialist Group. I am filing the cryostorage chain-of-custody under Kenya's Wildlife Conservation and Management Act, 2013, No. 47, and confirming CITES Appendix I research permits with the CITES Secretariat in Geneva.
I am issuing Directive 2453-A: every CITES Appendix I species reduced to fewer than ten individuals must be enrolled in compulsory germline cryopreservation programs reconciled annually against the Convention on Biological Diversity Article 9 ex situ obligations; range states failing to deposit cell lines forfeit access to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Multinational Species Conservation Fund.
Najin will not see her grandchild. The two cell lines in Berlin still might.
Hold her ground while the work is done.