How an ‘unthinkable’ panda pregnancy was orchestrated amidst a pandemic
WASHINGTON: A few days after the pandemic forced the National Zoo to lock its gates, there was a message in the panda urine.
The hormone levels of 22-yearold Mei Xiang showed she might be ready to conceive a cub. Her keepers, who thought her years of mothering were over, were eager to try one more time. But how could they orchestrate a panda pregnancy without unsafely bringing together too many people in the age of social distancing?
The answer was sitting in a freezer. No zoo in the United States has ever successfully used frozen semen to impregnate a panda, and no panda as old as Mei Xiang has ever given birth in America. With a limited staff and a baster-type instrument, they tried anyway.
On Friday – after five months of coronavirus case counts and death tolls, closures and reopenings, uncertainty and anxiety – news from Northwest Washington ignited the Internet. A pink fuzz-covered panda cub had just come squealing into the world.
“Imagine that. She does the unthinkable,” said zookeeper Laurie Thompson.
“At 22, she just says here you go, I’ll give you something good.”
The newborn’s arrival was watched by so many people on the zoo’s panda cam that the website crashed. Panda superfans across the globe refreshed their browsers while newcomers desperate for a moment of delight pleaded with the Smithsonian’s tech team on Twitter to fix the feed.
By Saturday morning, the site was restored, Mei Xiang was nursing and the bitty bear was putting on a show for its viewers, squawking as it burrowed into its mother’s 238-pound body. The cub weighs about four ounces, as much as a stick of butter.
“I feel like a kid,” said zoo director Steve Monfort.
“What can I tell you? I sometimes curse them for all the time and effort we have to put into them, but at times like this, it’s just undeniably joyful.”
His employees kept caring for the zoo’s 2,700 animals during the four months it remained closed and have carefully navigated reopening plans that include timed-entry passes. The new system kept away the pandamania that the park would typically see.
Instead, more than a dozen masked journalists appeared just after dawn Saturday to feed the insatiable appetite of pandaloving viewers. Keepers who had been awake for more than 24 hours stood for interview after interview about the best news to come to Washington in months.
At the centre of it all was Thompson, who helped raise all three of Mei Xiang’s cubs – Tai Shan in 2005, Bao Bao in 2013 and
Bei Bei 2015 – before they returned to China under a conservation agreement between the two countries.
“I got the call saying, ‘You better come in’,” Thompson recalled about her Friday afternoon.
Only on Aug 14 did an ultrasound reveal that Mei Xiang was likely pregnant. Although pandas can have a gestation period of anywhere between 90 and 180 days, the mother was licking herself in a way that told keepers the birth was likely hours or minutes away.
Mei Xiang was alone in her den, laying beside what looked like a pillow of bamboo she had arranged in the corner. The keepers and a veterinarian were in another room nearby, watching on a screen in case anything went wrong.
“She has proven to us over the years that she is a great mother. We sit back and watch and let her do her thing,” said Brandie Smith, the zoo’s head of animal care.
Around 6.30pm, Mei Xiang started making loud, halting noises known as “honking.”
“Then she got up and I thought she was repositioning herself, but then we heard the cub cry. She did exactly what she needed to do. She picked that cub up right away and started taking care of it,” Smith said.
The staff stayed up watching her through the night, unsure whether the birthing was done. Around half of panda cubs are born in pairs. Bei Bei’s twin died a few days after birth and Bao Bao’s twin was a stillborn. If Mei Xiang were to have another cub this time, it will happen within 24 hours of the first.
Zookeepers will keep watching mother and cub at all hours in the coming week, listening for the squeaks from the newborn that let them know all is well. After about a week, Mei Xiang will feel comfortable leaving her cub for the first time and will get up to eat. The keepers will then use a wall to separate the pair momentarily to inspect the cub for the first time.
With an animal so little, zookeepers probably won’t know its sex until they do genetic testing. And it will be months before the cub is viewable to the public. So as reporters packed away their cameras Saturday morning and the zoo opened for the day, multiple mothers could be heard explaining to their children that the new cub was too little to come outside.
Instead, they cooed over Tian Tian, the giant panda whose 5-year-old semen was used in March. His keepers said he does seem quieter than usual, perhaps because he can hear the cries of the baby.
But like in the wild, Tian Tian will have no role in raising the new cub. While mom was inside nursing, the father was busy outside, eating his breakfast. — The Washington Post