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.