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The duck is famous for two things: really love bread (even if they are not supposed to eat it) and handle incredibly complicated breeding pieces. More specifically, male ducks have a corkscrew-shaped penis, while females reproduce the corkscrew in the opposite direction. This is a worrying consequence of an evolutionary arms race, the counter-measure of women against men who are notoriously aggressive.
But you know who tends not to worry about his strangely complicated reproductive system? It would be the rhinoceros. More specifically, the cervix of a female rhinoceros, a long cbad leading to the bad, deforms and scribbles everywhere. "It's made up of a number of interlocking ridges or rings that look like connecting 8 to 12-inch connected S's," says Barbara Durrant, director of reproductive science at the zoo. from San Diego. "It's like Lombard Street in San Francisco, where there are only round trips, round trips."
This has perfectly adapted the rhinoceros to the evolutionary history, but it is now another disadvantage for the survival of this kind. Due to habitat loss and poaching, the northern white rhino in particular is about to disappear, it is extinct in the wild with only two females – which are not even viable in the reproduction – left in captivity. But now, San Diego's zoo has teamed up with robotics from the University of California at San Diego to find a new solution: a snake-shaped robot that navigates through this chaotic cervix and to deposit an embryo in the uterus. If it works, it could mean the salvation of the northern white rhino. Oh, and you can help make it a reality, because it benefits from crowdfunding.
UC San Diego
The robot would be deployed on a close relative of these two remaining females of northern white rhinos, the from South white rhino. These animals are subspecies. Therefore, if they do it correctly, one can carry the embryo of the other. (A good indication of this compatibility is that both can hybridize naturally.)
The problem is that we do not have Northern white rhinoceros eggs, although we have small amounts of preserved sperm. Researchers must therefore try to create their own eggs using a process that has been proven in the mouse. The idea is to take surviving white white rhinoceros skin cells and "realign" them by biochemically manipulating certain genes to go back in time, bringing them back to a state where they are pluripotent, which means they can differentiate into almost every cell type the body.
"So we take them upside down, and then we send them again, but in a different direction, so that they no longer become skin cells," Durrant says. "If we can make sperm and eggs in vitro from northern white rhinoceros cells that are living cell lines, we can use them to fertilize each other and create pure white rhinoceros embryos.
This is just the beginning. Next, the team would need to obtain the fertilized Lombard Street embryo from the uterus of a southern white rhinoceros substitute. This is where the newfangled robot, originally developed for human use in procedures such as colonoscopies, comes into play.
"They have to navigate through complex and very winding twist channels," said UCSD robot scientist Michael Yip, who developed the system. "Thus, several 180-degree turns that conventional tools, anything that was hand-crafted or developed previously, would not allow to pbad the first round."
Yip's robot does not work like everyone else you've seen before. (Unless you're looking at our beautiful video of the inflatable vinebot, which uses a similar mechanism to steer.) Unlike, say, a humanoid robot with traditional electric motors moving its joints, it uses a series of tendons to move it. extending along its length. Pull a tendon on the left side of the device and this one turns left. Pull a tendon on the right side of the device and this one turns to the right.
"You can then secure more and more cables over the entire length of the device," says Yip. "You can coordinate all the movements of the tendons as if you were marionette a puppet so as to obtain S-shapes and get couples and twists of the system."
An operator controls the movements of the robot by relying on a camera located at the end of the device, which helps him navigate the labyrinth that is the rhinoceros neck. To complete the trip, he would also have a delivery system to place the embryo in the womb. (The robot could also, in the short term, deliver sperm, as opposed to an embryo, to artificially inseminate other species of rhinoceros.)
Ken Bohn / San Diego Zoo
At this point, you're probably wondering: well, we have a good idea of why ducks have such a clumsy reproductive system, but why rhinos? "The only thing I can really think about, and this is pure speculation," says Durrant, "is that the fetus and placenta of a rhinoceros are so large and there is so much fluid that the cervix must be tall, muscular and complicated. make sure the fetus stays in the uterus. There exists, after all, in the human woman a condition called incompetent cervix, in which weak cervical tissue leads to a miscarriage. But again, elephants also have a huge fetus and their reproductive systems are not so complex.
Anyway, the mission here is not to decode the rhinoceros evolutionary reproductive history, but to save rhinoceros. "Our ultimate goal is to produce an autonomous population of Northern White Rhinos, first in captivity, and then back into their natural habitat in Africa," said Durrant. "This is not a one-off scientific project, but a genuine conservation effort."
As a result, the northern white rhino will need much more help than by intelligent robots. It will be necessary to put an end to the poaching which has almost erased its kind. "It's not just science," Durrant. "This is how we can use science to bring them back to a habitat that is preserved, preserved, and restored." All this sophisticated science to feed the rhinoceros population is nothing if humans put it at risk again.
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