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A baby's arrival is always a big event. But rarely is a newborn greeted by international
headlines and a world eager to follow every twitch of its four-ounce, fist-sized
body.
Hua Mei's birth made international headlines. |
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On August 21, 1999, however, animal lovers the world over rejoiced as Hua Mei
became one of just a handful of baby giant pandas ever to be born in captivity.
This week, NATURE's THE PANDA BABY tells the inspiring story of this pint-sized
arrival -- the product of years of focused and often frustrating work by scientists
and conservationists in China and at the World-Famous San Diego Zoo in California.
Native to the misty bamboo forests of central China, giant pandas are among the
best known -- and most endangered -- animals in the world. Scientists have named
them Ailuropoda melanoleuca, meaning "black and white cat-footed animal." In China,
they are known as Daxiongmao, which means "large bear cat."
But conservationists estimate that only about 1,000 of the big black and white
bamboo-eating bears remain in the wild in China, where they are threatened by
habitat loss and hunting. Another 140 live in breeding facilities and zoos, with
about 20 of those captive bears living outside their homeland. In the United States,
just three zoos -- in Atlanta, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. -- shelter pandas.
The animals are precious, with the zoos paying up to $1 million a year to the
Chinese government for the privilege of "borrowing" the animals for display and
study.
For years, biologists have hoped that they might learn to breed these captive
bears, in hopes of ensuring the animal's survival. But it has been a long and
frustrating process. Faced with little understanding of panda behavior and biology,
some zoos have been unable to create just the right conditions to spark a panda
romance. Others have succeeded in getting their female pandas pregnant, only to
have the cubs die within days of birth. With each heartbreaking failure, the puzzle
of panda reproduction seemed to grow even more complicated.
In 1997, however, the San Diego Zoo got a chance to take another crack at the
problem. Home to the Center
for the Reproduction of Endangered Species (CRES), the zoo has become world-renowned
for figuring out how to get rare and threatened animals to reproduce. Hoping that
CRES could help them solve the panda challenge, Chinese scientists loaned the
zoo a pair of the animals for 12 years.
They made quite a couple. Bai Yun was a frisky five-year-old female -- one of
the first captive-born pandas produced by the Chinese. At 20, male Shi Shi was
also an interesting story. He had been severely injured in the wild, and was nursed
back to health. But his injuries were too severe to allow him back into the bamboo
forests.
From the very start, the zoo staff took every possible
step to ensure that they would eventually be able to roll out a birthday cake.
The pandas were coddled and carefully cared for. But after two breeding seasons,
they had little to show for their hard work. The panda couple wasn't even getting
along. So their human caretakers interceded, artificially inseminating Bai Yun
with sperm taken from Shi Shi.
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Bamboo Bears
How zoos are trying to save the giant panda
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Cub Quest
The true story of the lady and the panda
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Panda Pearls
Discover some fascinating panda facts
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Resources
Learn more about Hua Mei and other pandas
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Panda Scramble
Play our game!
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