Equine Reproduction Advances: Filly Born a Year after Dam’s Death

Mira, a foal born Aug. 4, runs happily in Binghamton, N.Y., even though her mother died almost a year ago from a ruptured intestine. Her birth was made possible through a team at Cornell that might be among the first to successfully extract and ship eggs from a dead mare for remote fertilization and implantation.
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Mira, a foal born Aug. 4, runs happily in Binghamton, N.Y., even though her mother died almost a year ago from a ruptured intestine. Her birth was made possible through a team at Cornell that might be among the first to successfully extract and ship eggs from a dead mare for remote fertilization and implantation.

After the mare died at the Cornell Hospital for Animals, veterinarian Sylvia Bedford-Guaus, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACT, and her laboratory team–graduate student Lori McPartlin and technician Stephanie Twomey–made use of special tools and their expertise from years of research to scrape the wall of each follicle in both of the ovaries obtained from the mare, Rebaqua.

“The process is time-sensitive and very intricate,” said Bedford-Guaus, explaining that the eggs (oocytes) can only be seen microscopically and must be collected from the ovary within a few hours.

“There were other approaches, such as shipping the entire ovary, but none that could offer the success rates we had with this procedure,” she said, adding that when equine ovaries have been shipped before, few pregnancies have resulted in no live births because the oocytes do not stay viable within the ovaries. (Read more: “AAEP Convention 2004: Pregnancies from Dead Mare Ovaries

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