Much hope has been placed on Sudan, the last male northern white rhino.
He has been called "the most desirable groom in the world" on the dating app Tinder, "the most famous rhinoceros" in various media and a "gentle giant" by the armed guards who guarded him 24 hours a day.
But Sudan's life bore the burden of his entire species decimated by poaching.
In Ol Pejeta Game Reserve at the foot of Mount Kenya, AFP photojournalist Tony Karumba took the celebrated photos of Sudan on December 5, 2016, about 15 months before the rhino's death.
The first thing that catches your eye in Karumba's photo is the tender relationship between the people of the reserve and Sudan.
The photo has the weight of an icon, but it's not iconoclastic, reflecting an ordinary moment of belated but sincere care that northern white rhinos received from the species that decimated them.
He disappeared forever, but lived on in Karumba's photo series.
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Karuma made famous pictures when Sudan was released from the pen to pasture.
"That moment is full of trust and love," says Karumba.
“When I was in Sudan's presence, I always felt like I was visiting some kind of sage; his demeanor, despite his monstrous size, radiated calmness and patience towards me and although his guardians were always hovering just outside the frame of my camera, he accepted my cautious intrusions and was as composed as if he were aware of his own symbolism as the last icon of his subspecies ."
The photo shows Sudan's profile and his two horns, a distinctive feature of the white rhino subspecies, which were cut off to deter poachers.
A Sudanese keeper soothes the two-and-a-half-ton animal, whose head is longer than a man's torso.
Karum's visor, his low perspective of Sudan, "just emphasizes the power and bearing of the rhino," says Michael Pritchard, program director of the Royal Photographic Society in the UK.
"The strength of this photograph is the interaction between this impressive animal and this man," says Pritchard.
"There is a tenderness, a relationship between them."
Sudan spent most of his life in the Dvur Kralove Safari Park in the Czech Republic from 1975 to 2009.
He was then transferred to the highly protected Ol Pejeta Reserve in Laikipia, Kenya, as a last ditch effort to encourage breeding with the remaining females of his subspecies.
That didn't work.
Sudan died on March 19, 2018, at the age of 45, dashing all hopes of saving the northern white rhino from extinction.
Only two female northern white rhinos - both ex-zoo animals named Najin and Fatu - remain alive in Ol Pejeta, Kenya.
Neither of the two can sustain a pregnancy and the subspecies is now "functionally extinct".
But there has been renewed hope that it may be possible to resurrect the northern white rhino after scientists achieved the first IVF pregnancy in a closely related subspecies of the southern white rhino.
They now hope to do it again with the northern white rhino.
"We are confident that we will be able to do it again with the northern white rhino in the same way and that we will be able to save the species," Susan Holze, a scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoological and Wildlife Research in Germany, told BBC News. part of the Biorescue project, a consortium working to save the white rhinoceros species.
"Sudan was one of those news stories that went around the world," says Pritchard.
"His photographs show that we are changing the world in a way that numbers, statistics or government meetings cannot.
"That's the power of photography: to move an audience that might not respond to facts and figures."
The photos themselves are pretty "ordinary," adds Pritchard.
But the context of those photos moved him.
Sudan's story has become much bigger than Sudan itself.
"We're looking at something that's no longer with us both at the individual level but, more importantly, at the species level," says Pritchard.
The first time the world got a glimpse of the functional face of extinction, it couldn't get enough.
Sudan's campaign has brought him fans from around the world, visits from tourists and donations to conservation initiatives.
When news of his death broke, politicians and celebrities posted photos of themselves and Sudan.
On December 20, 2020, Google placed a drawing on the main page in memory of Sudan, which casts a large shadow in the illustration, which appeared in search engines on every continent except Antarctica.
"I feel fortunate and accomplished that my efforts to document my own view of Sudan have been so well received and continue to be," says Karumba.
"Time and time again, our coverage of Sudan has provoked reactions, drawing interest from the mainstream media and conservation circles."
Sudan - and his aging character - showed people how vulnerable rhinos are, says Karumba, who regularly encountered Sudan during his last decade in the Kenyan reserve.
Rhinos, the biological equivalent of armored tanks with an anachronistic dinosaur posture, are deceptively tame.
"I remember being surprised at how calm he was while I was taking pictures of him and the females," Karumba wrote of his first encounter with Sudan.
"We were all just hanging around him and climbing on his crate to get the best possible picture. But he was completely calm."
Why are the northern white rhinos izdied in nature?
Poaching has devastated the population of African rhinos.
It was also fueled by increased demand for keratin-rich rhinoceros horn for use in traditional medicine,
In 1960, there were still 2.360 wild northern white rhinos in the wild, but in 2008 the subspecies became extinct.
From the grave, Sudan has gone from a symbol of optimism to a cautionary tale, cemented in the iconography of conservation, says Oxford University sustainability economist Michael Sass Rolfes.
When Sass-Rolfs met Sudan in Kenya at meetings of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's African Rhino Specialist Group near the end of the rhino's life in 2013, "he was like a living dead man."
Rhinos are, as Sass-Rolfs says, a "charismatic" endangered species.
Other charismatic specimens include elephants, big cats and bears, all of which excite the public's imagination, he says.
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Charismatic wild animals walk a thin fragile line between adoration and fear, fueled by attention from economically developed countries.
You don't have to go beyond branding to see charismatic wildlife taking center stage.
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, fledgling international wildlife nonprofits such as the World Wildlife Fund launched Save the Rhinos campaigns, Sass-Rolfs says.
"Our relationship with charismatic wild animals is complex, but they have always been extremely valued," he says.
"NGOs used powerful images to raise funds."
William Faulds, a wildlife veterinarian and conservationist, has witnessed first-hand the bloody repercussions of poaching in South Africa, which is home to more rhinos than any other country.
In 2022, 448 rhinos were illegally killed in South Africa, up from 451 in 2021, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The amount of brutality inflicted on rhinos depends on the level of experience of the poacher, who usually uses a saw or machete to cut off the horn, Faulds said.
"Pieces of his face and flesh fly off his body, flying several meters away from the rhinoceros, with bloodstains on the vegetation all around," he says.
"You can see from the tracks on the ground where the animal tried to escape."
As he looks at the photo of Sudan, one word comes to mind for Faulds - loneliness.
"We have taken over their world. We destroyed their habitat. And we appeared at a time when there were very few of them left on the planet," he says.
Rhinos are social creatures and very mild-mannered, Faulds says.
They are intelligent, with diverse characters.
"Like the Sudanese guard in this picture, people who see the photo feel very close to him and feel privileged to be able to spend time with the last of his species," says Faulds.
"They are vulnerable. Obviously the numbers of copies in people's hands keep that going."
Faulds tells another famous, albeit more cheerful story about a rhinoceros.
Her name was Tendi, she was a female southern white rhino and she was mutilated by poachers on March 2, 2012.
Two more rhinos were attacked then, and both died.
Tandy recovered -- much to the surprise of the vets who cared for her, like the Faulds.
After this rescue and rehabilitation, she gave birth to more babies and proudly wore the scars on her face.
Sudan and Tendi have phenomenal stories, Faulds says.
Both of their faces are important in the fight against poaching.
They represent the first step in awareness of this problem.
"They inspire a lot of people, including me, to do more for rhinos," says Faulds.
"When you see an animal like that struggling to survive, you realize you have to get behind them and fight just as hard."
The story of rhino poaching is changing and extremely human, says Katie Lawton, an American specialist in the conservation of these animals.
The easiest comparisons are drug or arms trafficking, Lawton says.
Rhino horn is more valuable by weight than gold, diamonds or cocaine.
Wildlife crime is big business.
Poachers who make a living, motivated by poverty and hunger, are paid to poach by commercial syndicates.
Targeting individual poachers doing the dirty work won't solve the systemic demand framework, Lawton says.
It's easy for audiences from industrialized countries to view poaching from an unconsciously colonial lens and expect governments to solve the problem, Faulds says.
But the crisis here is deeply rooted, historical and socio-economic.
"The problem with endangered species like rhinos is that you don't have time to correct those long-term problems, because there won't be any rhinos left until you change those socio-economic circumstances," Faulds says.
Is the rhino horn trade still legal?
According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (Cites), the world trade in rhinoceros horn has been banned since 1977.
However, countries such as South Africa lifted the ban to allow domestic trade, based on the argument by commercial rhino farmers that legal trade would prevent poaching.
"Symbolically, Sudan made me think, 'I don't want that to happen,'" Lawton says.
"And he won't, never again."
Overall, rhino poaching rates have declined since 2018, when Sudan died.
Trade data indicate the lowest annual estimate of rhino horn entering the illegal market since 2013.
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A mix of conservation and biological management initiatives has led to a total of 6.487 black rhinos in all of Africa.
There are currently 16.803 white rhinos on planet Earth, and all but two are southern white rhinos.
The first viable in vitro fertilization pregnancy in a southern white rhino has raised hopes that the animals could be brought back from the brink of extinction.
"That photo of Sudan embodies the relationship between the animal kingdom and humanity," says Pritchard.
"Maybe the negative side, but there is also a positive human-rhino relationship that we could all aspire to. In the end, I see it as a positive image."
"Sharing these moments of the very special environment our planet is blessed with motivates us to continue to indulge in the wonders of nature's wilderness, it will show all that it is worth experiencing and preserving," says Karumba.
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