Less than a year ago, China released a five year old panda into the wild. Why is this news? He was the world’s first artificially bred panda to be released.
Unfortunately, Xiang Xiang didn’t survive. Scientists believe the panda fell from a height after a fight with wild animals (possibly other pandas) over food or territory. This is a terrible loss for the Wolong giant panda breeding center.
But the loss of Xiang Xiang is inspiring scientists to work on better preparing future pandas for life in the wild. China has been making a serious effort to save the giant panda — there are only between one and two thousand giant pandas in the wild. The Wolong center is part of the effort, breeding pandas through artificial insemination and teaching them to survive in the wild.
A group of four artificially bred pandas will be released into the wild soon. To avoid what happened to Xiang Xiang, these pandas will be trained to protect themselves. They will live with a specially trained police dog to watch (and hopefully learn) the dog’s survival behaviors.
This group of pandas is also all female — they may be less likely to pick fights over food and territory than males.
Adult pandas spend most of the day foraging for and eating bamboo — up to sixteen hours daily. The remaining eight hours are spent resting or sleeping. These are times when the panda is most vulnerable. Researchers at the Wolong giant panda breeding center select pandas for release very carefully. The ones who are chosen are trained for survival — as much as humans can teach pandas. Videos are used to teach mating and other behaviors.
Hopefully, the next pandas released into the mountains of Sichuan will learn enough self-defense from the police dog to survive. Ideally, the artificially bred pandas will integrate with and mate with wild pandas, introducing more cubs into the next generation. Captive pandas typically have low fertility rates, making it difficult to preserve the species in captivity.