Sunday, June 25, 2006
The Giant Panda post
As previously reported, we are in Chengdu today, on to Xian tomorrow. Chengdu is the capital of Szechwan province, a center of spicy food, fine tea shops, and giant pandas. More than 80% of China's thousand or so remaining wild giant pandas live in Szechwan, and the biggest panda preserve and research station is here.
Our guide seemed to know a lot about pandas, and I kept careful notes. However, I am not representing any of this as true, and have not in any way, shape or form "fact-checked his ass," as our friends on the left like to put it.
The giant panda, when you get right down to it, is only alive today because its so damned cute. Pandas are on a downward spiral, and it is not all man's fault. Among the world's oldest large creatures, pandas were once well-adapted carnivores. Pandas are thought to be 8 or 9 million years on this earth, and as recently as 1.7 million years ago they were meat-eaters. Then they became omnivores, then vegetarians, and now they eat only one sort of bamboo, known as "arrow bamboo."
Of the thousand or so species of bamboo, pandas can eat only about 40 and "like" only 27 species. Extreme pickiness of diet does not strike me as a great survival trait, especially since arrow bamboo "flowers" every 30, 50 or 100 years -- depending, as I understand it, on conditions -- and then all but vanishes from this vale of tears. Pandas all over Szechwan suffer a demographic disaster in the process. The last such flowering of the bamboo occured in 1982, and it almost did in the pandas.
That's not all, though. Pandas are not exactly fecund -- they reproduce less successfully than even Europeans. They are solitary creatures, so they encounter a suitable mate only occasionally. They do not always find the prospective mate sufficiently pleasing -- the pickiness of pandas extends beyond food. Well, they certainly look happy and relaxed, so maybe it's a good strategy.
Mate located, the timing has to be perfect. The giant panda mating season lasts only six weeks or so, from late March through early May, and during that time the female is in heat for only 1-3 days. The gestation period is extremely variable -- from 80 to 200 days -- which makes pandas particularly difficult to breed in captivity (it must be very difficult for pandas to plan their maternity leave -- no wonder none of them have jobs). If twins are born they abandon one of them. The babies are only a few ounces when born, and are amazingly slow to develop. A month into life they still have not opened their eyes, and they do not walk for many months after that.
According to our guide, panda mothers are "terrible," with no "maternal instinct." This was backed up by a film we saw in which the panda blew out its cub, shrieked in panic, and started whacking the poor little fellow all around the pen.
All of this, plus the depredations of man, add up to only 1590 giant pandas alive in the world today. The Chinese and international conservation groups are working against this trend by breeding pandas in captivity, perfecting artificial insemination, and investigating "high tech" solutions. I trust that this is a euphamism for cloning.
The panda research center in Chengdu is impressive, but I am sure it is not up to PETA's standards. Among other outrages, one can buy a cuddle with a grown panda for 400 Rmb. (about US$50) and even hold the single baby born at the center this year for 1200 Rmb. We bought the grown-up panda cuddle package for our son, pictured above.
This is all advertised as a means for financing the upkeep of the panda center. Your blogger wonders whether all this money is actually for the benefit of science. You can only pay this fee in cash directly to the two people who control access to the pandas, they keep this cash in their pocket, and they issue no obvious receipt. You get a receipt for everything in China, but not for cuddling a panda.
Finally, I got to the bottom of a subject that Cass and I debated some months ago -- are pandas actually bears? This is, apparently, an open question, in part because pandas evolved separately from the ancestors of bears so long before modern bears came into existance. Those who would classify pandas fall into no less than three schools of thought. Some say that they are ursine. Others say that they are only as related to bears as, say, raccoons, and are probably more like the latter than the former. There are then those who say that pandas are just pandas, appropriately all alone in the system of taxonomy. Any panda experts out there who want to comment?
2 Comments:
By 
Cassandra, at
Sun Jun 25, 02:13:00 PM:
More shameless 'panda-ing' to the base?
By GreenmanTim, at
Sun Jun 25, 10:00:00 PM:
Not an expert observation, by any means, but an anecdote that your Panda Cuddle package description evoked.
Back in the late 1970s in my very early teens, we were visiting cousins in Washington who had a significant bamboo invasion coming over from their neighbor's yard. After whacking vast quantities of bamboo, we got the idea that the best way to dispose of it was to call up the National Zoo and offer it to the Pandas. Much to ur surprise, not only did my Aunt encourage this fantasy but the zoo said "Sure, bring it over." We shoved her wood sided Chevy station wagon full to bursting with kids and bamboo and droove to the zoo, where they let us in a side entrance and relieved us of the bamboo. One wonders if Sing Sing and Lling Lling found DC bamboo to their taste, or whether it was too soon after Nixon brought the Panda's back from China for Panda experts in America to realize that our bamboo was probably not the best or most secure source of food for these national treasures. Still, it was a simpler age and magic for us
