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Bioniche to the hairy-nosed rescue
Jo Power, Sub Editor
13 February 2008
Wiggles the hairy-nosed wombat is the third baby to be born at the research center
Photo: Wombat Research Centre
Bioniche Animal Health A/Asia, an arm of Canadian biopharmaceutical company Bioniche Life Sciences, is supporting a project to ensure the survival of the Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat. The animal is an endangered Australian mammal, with only a few surviving in Queensland's Epping Forest national park.
 
Strategies to help the wombats survive and thrive include the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Bioniche Animal Health has contributed financially to an ART project based at the Wombat Research Centre in Queensland. Staff at the Centre are using traditional cattle breeding methods of superovulation and embryo transfer to boost offspring numbers from 25 breeding-age females.

Elsewhere in Australia, Bioniche has supplied reproductive hormones to a study examining the reproductive processes of Australian marsupials. As a result of the project, researchers were able to induce successful ovulation and mating in the Stripe-Faced Dunnart, a marsupial vulnerable to extinction.

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