The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘It’s a boy,’ National Zoo says of surviving giant panda cub
WASHINGTON >> Drum roll ... The twin giant panda cub is a boy — and its father is Tian Tian.
The National Zoo said Friday that the cub born there a week ago Saturday was doing well.
The other panda cub, also a boy and of the same father, died Wednesday. Officials said an initial necropsy shows the cub had inhaled some food product, which led to pneumonia.
The zoo’s female giant panda, Mei Xiang, was artificially inseminated twice this year — on April 26 and 27 — with semen collected from the zoo’s male giant panda, Tian Tian, and from a male at a research center in Wolong, China. The zoo used DNA tests to determine sex and figure out which male sired the cubs.
It has been a whirlwind nine days at the National Zoo after experts realized Mei was pregnant Aug. 19. She delivered the twins Aug. 22, and the smaller one died Wednesday afternoon after a six-hour effort by zoo keepers to save it.
Officials had used bottle and a tube to feed the smaller panda cub at various points.
On Friday, the zoo’s chief veterinarian Don Neiffer said the cub could have inhaled food during one of the feedings.
The handrearing and swapping of the cubs was necessary, he said. “If we had not done anything, there was a real chance that neither cub would survive,” said Neiffer.
It could have happened to either cub, Neiffer said, as both were hand fed at different times. Keepers had been switching the cubs as often as they could — giving one to Mei, while caring for the other in a special incubator. Then, at an opportune time, they would swap the animals.
This gave each cub time with the mother and allowed her to focus on them individually. Often, when twins cubs are born, the mother is generally able to care for only one, and the other dies.