Frozen Dumbo III Project

Europe has a population of African savannah elephants in many of its zoos. Through a captive breeding program coordinated by the EAZA, these elephants, born in captivity, guarantee the survival of the species regardless of their wild populations. But the reproduction of these groups of elephants needs, over the years, a external contribution that revitalizes your genetics. For this, a specialized group of Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, with the financing of Beauval zoo, collected sperm from wild elephants in 2009 and 2010 to be able to carry out artificial inseminations that would guarantee this essential generational vitality. The project was a success and new elephants were born thanks to this initiative, although ten years later the material collected was exhausted. That is why we had to get new samples, in 2023, there we joined together and participated in the Frozen Dumbo project in its third edition (FD-III).

Frozen Dumbo III was made in Selati Game Rererve, one of the wildlife reserves near the Kruger National Park in South Africa. A team made up of Germans, French, Spanish, South Africans, Israelis and Slovenians put to sleep a total of 25 adult elephants and obtained viable semen from 7 of them.

To do this, the FD-III team coordinated with the reserve guards. Once the adult males were located, the specialists put them to sleep with anesthetic darts from a helicopter. Once they were asleep and with a coordination that minimized the times to the maximum, the semen was extracted by electrostimulation, its viability was verified, it was frozen with liquid nitrogen, thus ensuring its validity for the next few years.