SLIDE 17
(Nancy Pratt)

So this is the guy you met in Thomas's talk. This is Onyx. He is the semen donor that we used in the artificial insemination. He is a 33 year old Asian bull who was also wild born; he was a circus elephant for awhile. Dennis Schmitt is the veterinarian, one of the veterinarians at the Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Mo. This is where Onyx lives. They have this hydraulic crush system which allows them to bring Onyx in and collect from him manually. There's no anesthesia involved in this. It doesn't take very long, about 20 minutes for the procedure, and they get great samples from him.

Here is actually the collection. Here's the penis hanging down, and we've just used a sterile palpation sleeve that's tied off at the bottom to collect the semen. Now, we're talking about something about the order of 50 mls, which is a good volume. I actually went out to Dickerson Park Zoo to do an assessment on Onyx before we were going to do the A.I. And what I needed to know was, since we have not yet perfected techniques for freezing elephant semen, I had to know how long Onyx's sperm would live in a container that keeps it cool, because we had to transport it from Missouri to Washington, D.C. So I stayed up for about 36 hours and brought the mobile lab from JoGayle Howard's lab here at the National Zoo to my motel room in Springfield, Missouri, and stayed up all night and watched this stuff swim around.

But another important part of this study was to determine if there were any pathogens in Onyx's sperm that we might introduce to Shanthi. So we also did some semen cultures and sent them to Dick Montali's lab to see if they could find anything that we needed to be concerned about because we are depositing this high in the reproductive tract. We didn't want to introduce any bacteria that might infect Shanthi.