And Then There Were Three. Northern White Rhinos, That Is.
Sad news out of San Diego today. Nola, the adorable old rhino living at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, has died, reports the Los Angeles Times. There are now three Northern White Rhinos left in the whole world.
Nola, you will recall, was the oldest of the four Northern White Rhinos, at the ripe old age of 41. She was also the only Northern White Rhino living outside of a sanctuary in Kenya. All Northern White Rhinos are lonely—cosmically, existentially lonely—but Nola was the only one of her kind within 9,649 miles.
Conservation officials recently announced a plan to bring this species back from the brink, using in vitro fertilization and surrogate Southern White Rhinos. The issue was collecting eggs from a female Northern White Rhino—there are two at the park in Kenya, and then there was Nola. With no known technique for harvesting eggs from living rhinos, the plan necessarily involved the death of a female, followed by quick action from whatever you call a person who harvests eggs from a dead rhino. Doctors? Scientists? Surgeons? Coroners? Scavengers?
At any rate, poor old Nola’s health was failing:
At 41, Nola was considered geriatric and had been battling a series of ailments, including a persistent abscess and bacterial infection. Last week she took a turn for the worse, becoming listless.
“In the past 24 hours Nola’s condition had worsened significantly,” according to a statement issued Sunday morning by the Safari Park. “Early this morning, the team made the difficult decision to euthanize her.”
Nola’s death, while undeniably a huge, huge bummer, has presumably given conservationists a narrow but real shot at keeping her species on earth. There’s no word on whether her eggs were harvested, but if that was the plan, this was the first good shot, and a way to give the death of this magnificent animal a little meaning in an otherwise shitty-as-hell situation.
