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PITTSBURGH — Over the last 10 years, 70 percent of Africa's wild elephant population has been killed off. The main cause is ivory poaching, in which elephants are slaughtered for their valuable tusks. At the same time, efforts to breed captive zoo elephants have not been very successful. Now, there is some good news. At zoos in Austria and England, two baby elephants were born using sperm from South African wild elephants. For the first time, elephant sperm gathered in the wild was frozen and given to zoos. Two female zoo elephants were artificially impregnated with the sperm and went on to deliver calves. The new project is known as Project Frozen Dumbo. It was launched by several international partners.
Many Partners Helping The Effort
Scientists had tried to use frozen elephant sperm in the past, but were not successful.
The process is still experimental but considered to be promising by international elephant conservation groups. The new development came at a good time: Last Tuesday was World Elephant Day, which is held to draw attention to the wild elephant crisis.

Project Frozen Dumbo is a partnership among several institutions: the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, the Pittsburgh Zoo, the Vienna Zoo and ZooParc de Beauval in France. It grew out of discussions between two people: Barbara Baker, president of the Pittsburgh Zoo, and Thomas Hildebrandt of the Leibniz Institute. It was Hildebrandt who came up with the new method of freezing elephant sperm.The new process, Baker said, will help introduce fresh genetic material into the captive African elephant population's gene pool. Greater genetic diversity is essential if the zoo population is to remain healthy. It is now more likely, she said, that the captive elephant population can expand. (To offset a quote like this, click the quotation marks when editing your blog. Be SURE to include a source if you copy directly from another website.)

A Difficult Task
In 2011, teams from the Pittsburgh Zoo and Leibniz Institute, including Baker and Hildebrandt, traveled to the Phinda Resource Reserve in South Africa. There, they helped wildlife researchers tranquilize and collect sperm from 15 wild bull elephants. The material was frozen using Hildebrandt’s process. The collected semen led to two successful births in Europe in 2013 and 2014. A third elephant is now pregnant at another zoo in England. “It’s monumental,” said Willie Theison, elephant program manager at the Pittsburgh Zoo. “Previous attempts at collecting and freezing (wild elephant) semen in the U.S. and Europe didn’t work. We were looking for a wide age group — they hand-picked specific bull elephants from 12 to 30 years old.” Frozen Dumbo has the support of elephant conservation groups, including the International Elephant Foundation. “This has been done in other species, but never before in elephants,” said the foundation’s director, Deborah Olson
Poaching Is A Big Problem
Ivory poaching in Africa is fed by a strong demand for ivory trinkets in Asia. Together with rapid deforestation, poaching has caused the wild elephant population to drop drastically. It has gone from about 1.5 million in 2004 to between 300,000 and 400,000 animals.

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