Why everyone’s talking about... Giant pandas
Britain’s only giant pandas, Yang Guang and Tian Tian, might be leaving Edinburgh Zoo to go back to China. What’s the story?
IT’S not the latest breakdown in UKChinese relations, thankfully. But amid mounting losses from lockdown, the zoo can’t afford the £1 million a year it costs to lease the pair from the Beijing government, which owns all the world’s pandas. So they are likely to be returned this year. If that happens, a favourite joke in Scottish politics, that ‘there are more pandas in Scotland than Labour MPs’, would no longer apply.
How rare are giant pandas?
Experts reckon there are 1,864 in the wild. Last year, 44 were born in China in captivity – adding to the 589 already in zoos and sanctuaries. No Westerner even saw a live panda until 1916, when German zoologist Hugo Weigold purchased a cub. In 2018, after much conservation work, the species’ prospects were raised from ‘endangered’ to ‘vulnerable’.
Why so rare?
Female pandas are fertile for only two days a year, and often their mates don’t know how to perform. One Thai zoo resorted to showing its males ‘panda porn’ to help. Cubs are fragile – about 4oz when born, or 1/900th the size of the mother (in humans the ratio is 1/20). They are born blind, pink and without genitalia. Unfortunately, London Zoo’s attempts to raise a cub have been blighted. Chi Chi (bought from the Chinese in 1958) refused to mate with a panda from Moscow Zoo and her subsequent death so saddened the nation that then Prime Minister Ted Heath asked for a pair to replace her. Ching Ching and Chia Chia arrived but also failed to breed. Their own replacements, Ming Ming and Bao Bao, fared no better.
And when they are fully grown?
It’s all about bamboo – their food, which is so low in nutrition they must eat up to six stone of it a day. Bizarrely and uniquely, pandas sometimes do handstands when they pee so as to spray more widely and attract a mate. Pandas typically live to be about 25. Last month, Xin Xing, the world’s oldest captive panda, died in western China, aged 38.
They’re a symbol of hope, too.
When the World Wildlife Fund was created in 1961, an image of a panda was designed by the ornithologist and painter Peter Scott – and, with tweaks, it has been the logo ever since.
But pandas know kung-fu, right?
Only in the movies…