AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Giraffes might be facing extinction, with their numbers dropping over 40% in the last three decades, but there's an effort to save the long-necked creatures, and it involves a procedure familiar to humans - IVF. Jason Pootoolal is president of Save The Giraffes, and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.
JASON POOTOOLAL: Hi, thanks for having me.
RASCOE: So, you know, you hear about elephants and rhinos being endangered in Africa, but I really didn't realize that giraffes are endangered, too. Like, what are the problems facing giraffes that have caused them to become endangered?
POOTOOLAL: They're facing kind of the same problems a lot of those other animals you mentioned are. Increased poaching and increased habitat destruction is really forcing their numbers on a downward trend.
RASCOE: So why do IVF? Are wild giraffes having fertility issues?
POOTOOLAL: Well, the good thing about giraffes is, if left to their own devices and given the habitat, they are actually quite good at being giraffes and making more of themselves.
RASCOE: OK.
POOTOOLAL: But we're fragmenting their population, so even if there is a large population of giraffes, a lot of the times, they're not able to intermingle and exchange their genetics, with roads and trains and cities being put up as barriers to their population. And with that comes a inbreeding coefficient, which really is no good for the genetic health of the giraffe.
RASCOE: OK, so the IVF is to help them be able to mate more broadly?
POOTOOLAL: Essentially, what we're able to do is breed giraffes throughout space and time. So populations that are far apart or even giraffes that would be in captivity or in the wild - we're able to bring them back into one global population and use those genetics to make a more robust population base.
RASCOE: So how are giraffes doing in captivity?
POOTOOLAL: The giraffes in captivity - they have no problem breeding, but it is a closed population, the same as these small population fragments in Africa would be. So there's no more introduction of genetic material into these captive populations. Using IVF, we'd be able to use a one-population approach where the giraffes in captivity and the ones in the wild would be able to use this increased population base size to increase genetic robustness of the entire species.
RASCOE: Is the process of IVF treatments similar to the treatment for humans?
POOTOOLAL: There's been a lot of research done in IVF for use in humans, but not only that, for our domestic animals. So we're able to look to these programs as, like, a template for how we can use the same tools to help save these endangered animals.
RASCOE: Do they just, like, get the shots and then produce more eggs? And...
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: ...Like, is it similar?
POOTOOLAL: It is fairly similar. So in the wild giraffe, you would - it would be the same. We need to have, basically, a reproductive lab on wheels, which is a truck with all the same material that you would use. We get the giraffe. We collect eggs. If it's a male giraffe, we collect sperm. And then that's taken back to a sterile lab where the embryos are created.
RASCOE: Oh, wow. There are fewer than 100,000 giraffes in the wild right now. How many more of them would we need before we can consider the population safe and conserved?
POOTOOLAL: The giraffe is a species that would have numbered in the millions across Africa. So, really, we have, like, a fragment of our historic population. Really, there's no hard and fast answer. What we need to do is figure out a way that we're able to share the world with these animals and conserve their habitat, at the same time being able to produce sustainable ways for us to exist on the planet.
RASCOE: That's Jason Pootoolal, president of Save The Giraffes. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
POOTOOLAL: Thank you very much.
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