decided to take another approach to elephants — a very hands-on approach, for some staffers.save the Asian elephant
Fewer than 40,000 Asian elephants exist in the world, and their population is in decline. So a decade ago, the Denver Zoo dedicated its ten-acre elephant terrain specifically to Asian elephants because"they were an endangered species, while African elephants were not classified as such until a couple of years ago," Davis explains.
And so the Denver Zoo became an expert in elephant sperm collection, sending the samples to zoos with females ready for insemination. An elephant ejaculates up to 100 milliliters of liquid — less than half a can of soda — that contains billions of individual sperm. After the ejaculate is collected, the Denver Zoo's elephant team looks at the sample under a microscope to see how the sperm are moving. After that, semen is packaged up for other zoos across the country that hope to inseminate female Asian elephants.
While natural breeding, in which a male and a female elephant are paired up, is often"hugely successful," Davis says, it's much harder to ship a whole elephant than it is to send its semen. The results of many other efforts are still unknown; female elephants stay in gestation for two years."Artificial insemination is still not a perfect science, and there are a ton of factors that go into a successful calf coming from it," Davis notes. Among other things,"females only cycle for about 36 hours, so you need to time it perfectly.