MOSCOW, November 25 (RIA Novosti) – While Russian lawmakers protest surrogacy for humans, a zoo in Russia’s Urals has launched a program to use brown she-bears as surrogate mothers for polar bear cubs.
The Yekaterinburg zoo is currently busy creating a polar bear sperm and egg bank, zoo spokesman Igor Permyakov told RIA Novosti on Monday.
It expects the first surrogate-born polar bear cubs to appear by 2018, Permyakov said.
Russian media spoke of a smaller timeframe recently, saying a brown she-bear from the Yekaterinburg zoo was set to become a surrogate mother, but Permyakov denied the reports.
“She’s 30 years old, and she’s had 20 cubs already. She’s not going to become a mum again,” he said.
Four zoos in Russia will participate in the program, the spokesman said.
This is the first such program for Russian zoos, but a zoo in Nizhny Novgorod successfully bred a brown bear cub from a surrogate mother of the same subspecies, confirming that the technique works, he said.
The world’s polar bear population is currently estimated at 25,000. The Arctic creatures are under threat from climate change, which is causing their habitat to shrink.
Surrogate motherhood among humans recently came under fire in Russia from the controversial lawmaker Yelena Mizulina, best known for successfully lobbying Russia’s anti-gay legislation.
Surrogacy technologies “need to be banned like nuclear weapons,” Mizulina said earlier this month.
It was not immediately clear what the lawmaker thought about the plans for ursine surrogacy and a sperm bank for polar bears, which rarely reproduce in captivity.
