Cincinnati Zoo rhino delivers stillborn calf

Zoo officials will try again
to inseminate the rhino.

CINCINNATI (AP) — An Indian rhino who was expected to give birth to the world’s first Indian rhino conceived by artificial insemination has instead delivered a stillborn female calf, Cincinnati Zoo officials said.

The 16-year-old mother, Nikki, went into labor at about 5:30 p.m. on Saturday and delivered the calf just before 11 p.m., zoo officials said. Zoo veterinarian Dr. Mark Campbell worked for 20 minutes to resuscitate the calf, but was unsuccessful.

“She never drew a breath,” said Dr. Terri Roth, the zoo’s vice president of Conservation & Science. “This is devastating news, but it won’t change our program. We’ll try again as soon as Nikki has some time off.”

Indian rhinos sometimes deliver stillborn calves, especially when it is their first calf, said Dr. Monica Stoops, the reproductive physiologist who worked for five years to develop the technique that made Nikki the first rhino impregnated with sperm that had been frozen and stored.

Indian rhinos are native to northern India and southern Nepal. Only about 200 remained before tough preservation laws began to be stringently enforced in the 20th century, experts say. Now there are an estimated 2,500 in the wild.

Rhinos can be hard to breed naturally because they can be aggressive and fight rather than mate.

Semen was collected from Himal, a male Indian rhino at the Wilds preserve in southeast Ohio, in November 2004. Zoo workers had to design and make the equipment to harvest the sperm and deposit it in Nikki’s uterus.

In August 2006, in their fourth attempt, the Cincinnati Zoo team succeeded in inseminating Nikki. The zoo announced the pregnancy in July, and Rhino experts pegged the delivery date for Christmas week.