Just over a decade ago, the saola made headlines round the world. Scientists discovered the animal in the remote Vietnamese highlands, the first large mammal to have been found anywhere in the world in more than half a century.
Since then, the creature, which looks like an antelope but is related to cattle, has been discovered in several areas across the country. In the late 1990s ecologists estimated about a thousand of these shy creatures, with their long pairs of distinctive black horns, were living in central Vietnam and Laos.
But Scientists working with WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) discovered last month that in less than 10 years saola numbers had crashed to around 200.
Even worse, population numbers are becoming so thin that prospects of them meeting and breeding are now slim.
The WWF team believes many saolas are being caught in snares for other creatures, such as bears, which are prized in the East for their gall bladders.
In addition, the saola is often hunted in its own right, so its distinctive head can be mounted as a trophy.
Scientists have been unable to breed saolas in captivity.
A group of scientists has therefore launched the ultimate high-tech bid to save the stricken creature: cloning. The project is the idea of scientists at the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology in Hanoi.
Led by Bui Xuan Nguyen, the team has already isolated saola DNA from tissue samples from creatures in the wild and, working with French scientists, have injected these into the eggs of cows, a goat and a swamp buffalo.
Early saola embryos were successfully created this way, but all died after a few days.
"We don't have any idea how to get past this stage," Nguyen admitted to Science.
The basic problem is a lack of knowledge about how saolas breed.
But Nguyen and other scientists remain confident they can clone the saola.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
RSS