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A native
carabao (water buffalo) gave birth to a twin, a male and
a female, in a farming village in Nueva Ecija, about 150
kilometers north of Manila. The rare event, according to
animal scientists, happens at the chance rate of 0.03
percent based on world record.
And, of
all coincidence, the birth of the twin carabaos took
place where “the world’s first test-tube female buffalo”
was born in 2002.
The
owner, farmer Carlos Ares, 52, named the twin “Terry”
(the female) and “Teroy” (the male) after their son
Jethro, nicknamed “Tura,” who took care of the dame,
especially during the latter days of her pregnancy.
“Terry”
and “Teroy” looked healthy since they were born about
3:30 a.m. on October 3, each weighing about 15 kilograms and the size of a normally born carabao. They moved about playfully
around the curious and amused neighbors.
Jethro
fed the twin with freshly cut napier grass which they
also fed the dame alternately with other common grass
and weeds on their backyard grazing area.
The
older Ares, also a director of the Macatbong Farmers and
Milk Producers Cooperative, said they had the mother
carabao mated with a Bulgarian Murrah in Aliaga town
when they brought her last year to haul palay harvests.
Local experts said nutrition and mating had nothing to
do with producing twin in animals.
Assistant
Cabanatuan
City
veterinarian Suzzette Ferry said there could have been
two egg cells released during the mating and got
fertilized. “Maybe, a cell division occurred between the
right and left ovary of the mother animal, thus it
developed into twin,” she said.
Dr.
Danilda Duran, head of embryo-transfer division of the
Philippine Carabao Center in Muñoz Science City, said
the case of “Terry” and “Teroy” was among the few twin
buffalos recorded in the animal science archive that
went through natural process.
Cabanatuan locals claimed that there was another twin carabaos born in
barangay Sapang Buhay near
Fort
Magsaysay in 1958.
In 2004
Duran and her team at the
Carabao
Center came out with the first twin test-tube carabaos
by inserting three embryos in both uterus of the
recipient female carabao.
They
filled the two uterine horns of the female carabao’s
reproductive organ with embryos they developed at the
Center’s satellite laboratory in India to induce
pregnancy. It was done, according to Duran, to produce
corpus luteum, a tissue that secretes hormones in the
ovary.
Back in
2002 the Center produced “Sharma,” which they claimed as
“the world’s first female riverine buffalo born in a
swamp” through in-vitro, or test-tube, process. The
technique involved vitrification of the embryo that came
from their Indian laboratory.
The
recipient of that embryo in the test-tube was a native
female water buffalo owned by Celestino Gonzales, a
neighbor of the Areses and also a member of their
carabao and milk-producing cooperative.
Duran
said they inserted the Indian-processed embryos to
Gonzales’s animal as the surrogate mother on February
15, 2002. It gave birth to Sharma on December 6, 2002.
“We have
observed Sharma grew faster than a normal buffalo
because she grew fast, had been bred naturally at two
years old, delivered a calf at the age of less than
three and gave the owner an average of 15 liters of milk
everyday,” Duran said.
Native
carabaos produce only about five liters of milk
everyday.
“Sharma
is expected again to give birth to her second calf
before her fifth birthday by December,” said Duran, who
sounded like an excited mother herself. |
