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Ohio Zoo Attempts To Mate Female Rhino With Her Brother For Species Survival
An anonymous reader writes "Unfortunately for the Sumatran rhino the fate of the species may boil down to a plan by the Cincinnati Zoo to breed their lone female with her little brother. 'We absolutely need more calves for the population as a whole; we have to produce as many as we can as quickly as we can,' said Terri Roth, who heads the zoo's Center for Research of Endangered Wildlife. 'The population is in sharp decline and there's a lot of urgency around getting her pregnant.'"
If Adam and Eve were the first two humans, please to explain how humanity got beyond the second generation without incest.
HERECY! GOD DID NOT CREATE ANY OTHER FIRST HUMANS BESIDE ADAM AND EVE.
on a side note, the imagination of religious nutjobs in order to avoid embarrassment, always amazes me.
Dude, give it up: Genesis 1 and 2 are already blatantly contradictory. You can insert unspoken context to change any fairytale into something vaguely consistent if you want, and tell me that God's just testing me because I refuse to re-interpret so it makes sense, but the fact is that it's just a playful fantasy written by someone was probably too high to review their notes.
I ask as a person who cares about the environment. I strongly feel humans should have a smaller footprint and stop damaging the environment.
However, we seem to be spending a small fortune on the last few members of a species. Whatever ecological roles the rhinos might have played would have been filled (or the entire ecosystem would have changed faster than usual, possibly not-in-a-good-way).
Shouldn't we be spending that money for conservation where the damage isn't this extensive? In a while, maybe by cloning or using frozen sperms/eggs, we might be able to revive the species.
"news for nerds" [x] Check.
UnCheck, massive disparition of species is not something that should be "nerd" specific.
"stuff that matters" [ ] Not so much.
DoCheck, it matters way more than the launch of the latest iSomething whose only "interesting" feature is the way it perfects a little bit more the trapping of the sheeps.
If we do not succeed in limitting the loss of biodiversity, at some not too far point the "quick fix" will be to get rid of us.
Forgive me, but I'd like to ask a reasonable, well thought-out question. From looking at the other threads, I feel it may be out of place here. Anyway...
Do rhinos breed with siblings in the wild? I know some mammals do, and some don't.
If rhinos do, then I don't see any problem with doing the same in captivity. They would be evolved to better handle the results of inbreeding.
If they don't, then it seems not only unlikely to work (unless done artificially), but also unlikely to be a viable way to propagate the species.
How people who are so thrilled with the idea of Darwinian survival are so concerned about extinction.
The two are inextricably linked.