For a long stretch, nobody could get a Sumatran rhino to have a calf in a zoo. Pairs were put together and nothing happened. Or something happened, and the pregnancy failed. This went on long enough that a reasonable person would have concluded the animal simply could not be bred in captivity.
Terri Roth at the Cincinnati Zoo kept at it with a female named Emi until it worked. Mary Kay Carson followed her into the barn and into the forest in Sumatra and photographed both ends of it. That is the book: one scientist, one rhino, one problem, and about a decade of being wrong.
The science it actually teaches
The hinge of the whole thing is a single piece of reproductive biology, and it is the kind of fact a child will repeat at dinner. It is also why this title earns its place on the Stealth Science shelf.
Most mammals a child knows anything about release an egg on a cycle. It happens whether or not a male is anywhere nearby. Sumatran rhinos do not work that way. The female ovulates only after mating. Until somebody worked that out, every breeding plan built on a calendar was aimed at a day that did not exist. All the effort was real and all of it was pointed at nothing.
How it got worked out is the other half. Roth tracked what was happening on Emi's ovaries with ultrasound, the same machine used on people, on a rhinoceros that had been trained to stand still and hold position for it. Not restrained. Trained, and paid in food for cooperating. A child who thinks zoo work means hosing out pens should sit with that page for a minute.
Then the failures, which is why I would put this book ahead of most of the shelf. Emi lost pregnancy after pregnancy. Each loss was recorded, and each one narrowed the problem, and the eventual answer was hormone support to hold the pregnancy in place. The book does not tidy that away into a montage. It counts them.
Underneath all of it sits the field science, which looks nothing like the barn. In Sumatra there is no headcount, because nobody sees these animals. You work from dung, from footprints, from wallows, from whatever a camera trap caught at three in the morning. The population is inferred, not counted, and the book is honest that the inference has wide edges.
And one idea that children find genuinely upsetting in a useful way: a species can end without anybody shooting it. Sumatran rhinos are solitary and the forest they live in has been broken into pieces, so a female can live a whole life without ever meeting a male. Extinction by not finding each other. Nobody has to be the villain.
The animal itself is worth the price too. Smallest of the rhinos, covered in reddish hair, two stubby horns, and the nearest living relative of the woolly rhino. Not the grey armored thing on the poster.
The child it lands with
A child who wants to work with animals usually pictures the wrong day. They picture the calf. This book shows the eleven years before the calf, which is a hormone assay, a scan, a chart, and a lot of writing things down that did not work.
That is either the best news that child has ever had or the end of the idea, and both outcomes are worth ten dollars.
It also suits a child who has read enough save-the-animals books to be bored by them. This one has a mechanism instead of a mood.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the point where the ovulation problem gets solved, and ask this one out loud: how many years were those people doing everything right and getting nothing, only because one assumption underneath the whole plan was wrong?
That is not a rhino question. That is how most stuck problems work, including the one in your kitchen this week.
What to know going in
This is a book about breeding, so it is a book about sex, and it is frank in the ordinary biological way. Mating, semen collection, ovaries, ultrasound of a uterus, gestation, miscarriage. Nothing is leering and nothing is coy. If you would rather have that conversation on your own schedule instead of on chapter four's, read it before your child does.
There is loss in it as well. The lost pregnancies are on the page, and so is poaching, and so is the plain fact that this species sits right at the edge.
The caution that matters most is the one nobody thinks of. This book was published years ago, and it ends hopeful. The years since have not been kind to the Sumatran rhino. Your child will finish it, feel good, and then ask how many are left now. Find that out before you hand the book over, because the honest answer is worse than the ending they just read, and they should hear it from you rather than from a search bar at eleven at night.
Where to get it
Emi and the Rhino Scientist is $9.99, the cheapest Scientists in the Field title we carry, and the smallest in scope on purpose. One animal, one scientist, one question. Buy it for the method rather than for the news, because the method holds and the news has moved on. If it works in your house, the heavier titles on the Stealth Science shelf will land easier afterwards.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Mission to Pluto: One Pass, No Brakes
Mission to Pluto: The First Visit to an Ice Dwarf and the Kuiper Belt by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Who Was Charles Darwin? Twenty Years of Evidence
Who Was Charles Darwin? by Deborah Hopkinson
Grade 3 to 6
Lessons in Science Safety: The Book Before the Kit
Lessons in Science Safety with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Thomas K Adamson Donald B Lemke
Grade 4 to 8
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
