mockingjay34

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to the p*rn bots that follow me. I hope ya'll like star wars

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If Omega had found the Skeleton Crew instead of Jod...

Hunter: *On Pabu* "We're getting a call from Omega!"

Omega: *Holding KB and Neel while Fern has climbed onto her back and Wim is hugging her leg* "Hi everyone!"

The Bad Batch: "..."

Omega: "Do you know where At Attin is?"

SM-33: "Can't say I've heard of-"

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Rex, comming Echo: Can you come collect your freak of a twin please Rex: He's doing things Echo: No I set him loose on purpose Echo: He needs enrichment

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on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

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Commander Fox: If I had a blaster with two blaster bolts, and I was in a room with Pong Krell, Count Dooku, and the Emperor. I would shoot the Emperor twice.

Palpatine, leans towards Mas Amedda: Can we seriously not get rid of this clone?

Mas Amedda: He's the only one who knows how to file our taxes...

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hey girl are you my slerp schedule because i am fucking you up

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Here’s to 2023, a year of as many little courageous kindnesses as possible. ♥️

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You know the thing about me is, if i found myself in the Star Wars universe during the clone wars my priorities would not be expose Palpatine and fix the galaxy, that’s just out of my hands. Nae, my priority would be to wife up an arc trooper and convince them all to rebel so we can settle down on a forest planet far far away. That my friends is do-able for me

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my autopsy results came back negative There was nothing in there

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Rex: General Kenobi's eyes are blue right? Cody: They are but a calm sea blue and they get these golden rims when the light hits them just right Rex: And when was the last time he smiled? Cody: Last night at about 11:37 when I said something that made him laugh Rex: Right and when's my birthday? Cody: Rex: When's my birthday, Cody?

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Fives: What would you do if I was kidnapped? Rex: Wait thirty minutes before they brought you back voluntarily

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jurassic park has a good philosophical message but unfortunately the only thing i ever take away from watching jurassic park is "god i wish i could go to jurassic park." like yeah it's a blatantly obvious don't create the torment nexus scenario, but this torment nexus has DINOSAURS.

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folk hero really

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faeries are not real but i wish thwy were so i could spray one with raid

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if i was in jurassic park i'd be fine because the dinosaurs would love me and therefore not eat me

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this actually is my first rodeo *sees a horse* what the fuck is that