Baby Pandas Face a Hard Road Ahead

You can’t trip over a television these days without being confronted with the gratuitously cute and fluffy face of a baby panda. After years of fruitless attempts at captive breeding, there is a sudden glut of cubs worldwide. The National Zoo in Washington, DC, started a nationwide sensation with its adorable puffball, Tai Shan, born July 9, 2005. The scramble for tickets to the zoo left one Craigslist poster offering oral sex in return for a view of the cub. San Diego’s baby Su Lin was born that August, and her daily movements were watched by thousands on the Internet. Now, Zoo Atlanta has its own black-and-white bundle of joy, Mei Lan, who made her first public appearance just last week.

North Americans are nothing compared to the Chinese, however. They’ve taken up the cause to save their native endangered species celebre. The government announced a record 34 pandas born in captivity in 2006, of which 30 survived. A whopping 217 pandas have been born in captivity since the program started in the 80s. One of the busiest centers of panda breeding is the Wolong Nature Reserve in southwestern China. Wolong boasted 17 cubs in 2005, not to mention the revoltingly adorable “panda kindergarten” video footage. Multiple baby pandas barreling down a plastic slide? Genius. A couple more years at this pace and pandas will be off the endangered species list for good.

But are giant pandas really bounding their way back from the brink of extinction, or are we just losing our minds in the midst of so much prime-time cuteness? The facts hold both promise and cause for concern.

Happy Mountain Funshine Bears for Ever and Ever!

In 1980, the World Wildlife Fund started working with the Chinese government to save panda habitat. They’ve done a heck of a job. There are now more than 50 nature reserves, up from just 13 two decades ago. As of 2005, 10,400 square kilometers of panda habitat was under protection, and more is planned under China’s National Conservation Program. The WWF has helped local populations surrounding the reserves to install more energy-efficient heating and cooking methods so residents cut down less wood from precious panda forests. And they’ve begun to build large wildlife corridors between parks to allow the populations to mix, a key to restoring strong gene flow. 

The work seems to have paid off. In 1988 just 1,100 pandas remained in the wild. By 2004, that number had jumped to 1,590. But even that number might be too low.

Pandas are shy, reclusive creatures, rarely seen by researchers or glimpsed by automatic cameras. The standard method for estimating panda populations is to tally individually distinctive bite marks left on pieces of undigested bamboo found in panda poo (pandas poo around 40 times per day, so the turds, at least, are easy to find). Last year, a team led by Michael Bruford of the Cardiff School of Biosciences in the UK used DNA fingerprinting technology to analyze poo samples. They found 66 unique DNA fingerprints in the Wangland Reserve; only 27 had been counted by the bite-mark method. Extrapolating upwards, the team suggested that China could be home to more than 3,000 giant pandas. “It’s quite a testament to the Chinese reserve system and to the elusiveness of this animal,” says Bruford.

The recent success of captive breeding is yet another feather in the cap of giant panda conservation. Reproductive biologists spent years watching pandas with no sex drive just stare at each other across a pen. Or worse, male pandas would attempt to mount a female’s head, says Jo Gayle Howard, a reproductive biologist at the National Zoo in Washington.  After a decade of intensive collaboration with the Chinese on things like enclosure design and reproductive technology, things have improved. “It just finally paid off. The Chinese have been role models in breeding pandas,” she says. “We’ve learned a lot from them and they’ve learned a lot from us.”

One of the hardest tricks was actually pinning down when female pandas ovulate – it’s a mere 24 to 72 hour window every two or three years. Howard and her team at the National Zoo watched their female’s flirtatious behavior and used hormones in the urine to pinpoint the best opportunity for artificial insemination. (They had to perfect the sperm extraction and processing, too.) Chinese scientists often rely on male bears to sniff out the fertile window. Once the bears copulate, the team swings in with a back-up dose of artificial insemination. But that trick only works when you have obliging males.

Of course China has lots of studs these days. The growing number of reproductively successful males means more genetic diversity for the captive population, more males to ship around and more sexual mentors to follow. Mentoring works better than “panda porn,” videos of pandas mating, which have been used to “train” naïve males about the birds and bees.

Good breeders are lent out to zoos around the world – at a price. Most of the baby pandas born in the U.S. recently were offspring of pandas on loan, which can cost around $2.6 million per year and up to $3 million per year per cub. Eventually the loaned parents and cubs born to them must be returned to China, usually after a couple of years. The Chinese government uses the money to train more panda scientists, pay for more panda research and protect more panda habitat. Because of course, the ultimate goal for all these programs is to return pandas to the wild. And herein lies the question: after all the happy baby panda time at zoos and the reserve-buying festival, are the wild mountains of China’s western provinces fit for them?

Send Them Back to Die

In April of 2006, the very first captive-bred panda was returned to the wild. Four-year-old Xiang Xiang, a male, was tracked by satellite and checked up on in person. Released into the mountains in Sichuan province near his captive home at Wolong, Xiang Xiang gained weight, interacted with other pandas and generally had a fine time of it.

That is until January 4, 2007, when things started heading south. Zhang Hemin, the director of the Research and Conservation Centre for the Giant Panda told the “Guardian” newspaper: “Xiang Xiang has been badly hurt in a competition with other pandas. We think he fell from a high place after being chased up a tree by a wild panda.” They have since lost track of the bear. And he might very well be dead.

But that’s what happens when you send a tame, personable bear back into a small, isolated reserve. There just might not be any more room for him. Because even though more than 50 panda reserves exist today, they protect just 45% of the remaining panda habitat and 61% of the population. Individual reserves range from a mere 80 to 2,000 square kilometers. The WWF estimates that most pandas are restricted to narrow strips of bamboo forest only 1 to 12 kilometers wide due to encroaching human development. Wangland, the reserve where researcher Michael Bruford tested out his DNA population-counting method, is completely encircled by a highway.

Even if China does manage to protect all remaining habitat and connect the weeny mountaintop reserves to one another, it still might not be enough. A full 50% of panda habitat was lost to forestry and development between 1974 and 1989 and it still dwindles today. Small-scale deforestation and herb collecting continues to drive pandas farther up the mountains. Poaching was a massive problem in the 80s and 90s (despite the crime being punishable by death until 1997) that has since slowed, but the loss of even a few animals from a small, isolated population drastically raises the local extinction risk.

With the continued success of captive breeding programs in both China and the U.S. and an ever-ready audience of cuteophiles ready to drool over the latest baby steps and ball games, it seems unlikely that zoo pandas will ever die out. Whether the wild population will have a similar opportunity to grow remains to be seen.