Vets using sperm bank to save elephant population
Veterinary specialists collected semen from a 35-year-old elephant today as part of a pioneering project to help save the endangered species worldwide.
The semen from Phamea, a big tusker, will be frozen and stored in an experimental elephant sperm bank.
For more than a decade, researchers worldwide have unsuccessfully tried to preserve the sperm of elephants by freezing it. But earlier this year Thai scientists claimed that their technique worked, although artificial insemination with the stored sperm has not yet been attempted.
Such a bank could assist in the survival not only of the rapidly dwindling population of Asian elephants, now estimated to total between 35,000 and 50,000, but also of the 500,000 African elephants whose numbers are being cut down by ivory poachers.
Thailand faces a dramatic decline of its elephant population. While some 100,000 of the mighty beasts ranged across the country at the beginning of the 20th century, less than 5,000 domesticated and wild elephants survive today.
