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Science In Action: Bringing Back the Northern White Rhino

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05/07/2018 GMT

Bringing Back the Northern White Rhino

BBC World Service - Science In Action, Bringing Back the Northern White Rhino

Scientists create hybrid embryos of extremely rare northern white rhino

Northern white rhino hybrid embryos. Also Tour de Flanders cycle race footage and the life cycle of trees and the complex origins of American dogs

Scientists have created embryos of hybrid Northern/Southern white rhinos. The Northern white rhino is functionally extinct (only two captive females exist). But by using sperm (previously frozen from the final male Northern white rhino, who dies in the spring) and eggs form surrogate Southern white rhinos. The team have been able to create embryos.

Tour de Flanders Footage and Phenology
The Tour of Flanders cycle race is the unlikely scene for an experiment of nature. But if you look at the scenery, the trees can hold clues to what might be happening with the climate. Many trees are very responsive to changes in temperature. So climate change could disrupt the eruption of leaves and blossom each spring. But data on the timings of this ‘phenology’ can be scarce. But when Belgian cycling enthusiast and Bioscience Engineer, Dr Pieter De Frenne  was watching footage of the famously arduous cycle race in Flanders, which happens every spring, he realised there were four decades of archived colour footage, showing the state of the trees in the background. And he’s used this goldmine of data, to show that a number of trees in the area have brought forward when they get their leaves by an average of 5 or 6 days, and that this is associated with increased average global temperatures between the 1980s and 2016.

Ancient American Dogs
We know from archaeological remains that domestic dogs lived in the Americas alongside the first humans over 10,000 years ago. But new evidence collected from the genomes of these early American dogs show that they didn’t evolve from North American wolves as you might expect. But were Husky-like dogs that came over from the Arctic and Siberia. Even more surprising is that only a very small percentage of these original American dog’s genes survive in current American mutts. This leads the researchers to think that when the Europeans colonised the Americas, 500 years ago, they bought their European dogs, and dog diseases, which may have wiped out the original hounds.

Picture: Northern White Rhino, Credit: EPA

Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Fiona Roberts

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