Lazy lovers with nothing but bamboo between their legs?

The Research Base for Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu is home to a whopping 118 pandas. So how, ask many visitors, can they be an endangered species?

The answer is that though advancements in breeding techniques have secured the captive panda population, in the wild they remain extremely vulnerable to humans encroaching on their native habitat. So reveals the new book “Giant Pandas: Born Survivors”.

Co-authored by Zhang Zhihe, chief of the base in Southwest China’s Sichuan province, and Sarah Bexell, a research scholar at the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver, the book answers many questions about one of the world’s most beloved – yet misunderstood – creatures.

Many who visit zoos take away the notion that giant pandas are lazy, clumsy, have poor survival skills and are not good breeders. A falsehood, declares “Giant Pandas”, based on observation of captive animals that do not need to forage for their food. In the wild, foraging is the  main activity of pandas, taking up an average of 14.2 hours a day.

Pandas are in fact highly adept at negotiating their natural habitat and not clumsy at all. 

They walk with their toes turned in, giving them a clumsy appearance, but their strong legs allow them to move silently and with remarkable ease over precipitous terrain and through dense bamboo forests where humans would find themselves trapped.

Zhang and Bexell say pandas would be doing well had their habitat not been decimated by humans. Contrary to popular opinion, pandas are extremely adept breeders, but only when left alone in their natural environment.

“The panda’s penis size is often mentioned as a factor in unsuccessful breeding. Like many animals, pandas have diminutive penises, but size is not important for reproduction. What matters is that the male’s anatomy fits with that of the female and that they live species-typical lives in order to learn proper mating rituals and methods,” Zhang says. 

“You might be interested to know they are endowed with sizeable testicles,” he adds. 

Jean Pierre Armand David, a French priest and naturalist, was the first Western explorer to discover and document the giant panda, in 1869.

During the 20 years he lived in China, he named and introduced 68 new bird species to the West, as well as over 100 insects and other mammals. 

Giant pandas once enjoyed a very large range and their fossils were first unearthed in Myanmar in 1915 and in China in the early 1920s.

During the Pleistocene era, a period of geologic time spanning 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, giant pandas were distributed from northern Myanmar to eastern China. As recently as 1850, giant pandas still existed in western Hubei and Hunan provinces as well as in eastern Sichuan.

Today, pandas survive solely along the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in six mountain ranges within Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, their habitat totalling about 23,000 square kilometres.

“The general consensus is that such rapid contraction must be ascribed to human population growth and land use rather than climate change,” Zhang says.

With most valleys inhabited by humans, many pandas are isolated in narrow belts of bamboo no more than 1 to 1.2 kilometres in width.

“Therefore, their actual geographical range is much smaller than generally depicted on maps. Although the panda’s total range encompasses 23,000 sq km, there actual habitat probably comprises less than 20 per cent.”

Zhang and Bexell began working together in 1999, when Zhang took a job as deputy director of the base, joining Bexell, who was  already there conducting panda behavioural research for the United States’ Zoo Atlanta.

Moved by the panda’s plight, Bexell soon signed on to help the base develop the largest zoological education department in China.

They had an immediate mutual respect for each other’s work. Both understood how crucial their respective areas of expertise were for the battle to protect giant pandas and their habitat.

Zhang specialises in veterinary medicine and genetics, and Bexell’s areas of expertise are  animal behaviour, the human-animal bond and international biodiversity conservation.

“Many species are in desperate need of help, so why focus on giant pandas? A major reason is their universal appeal and recognition. If we cannot rally humanity for a creature as universally appealing as the giant panda, what hope is there for the future of our planet as we know it today?” asks Zhang.

Current rates of species extinction are greater than anything experienced on Earth since the cataclysmic natural event that caused dinosaurs’ extinction 65 million years ago. Scientists estimate that more than half of existing species could be extinct by 2100.

“It is urgent that humans come to understand that it is biodiversity, in all its enormity and complexity, that allows for our existence. It is biodiversity that provides and cleans our air and water, gives us food, protects us from diseases, buffers our storms and provides us with beauty and places of solitude. The biodiversity crisis we face today is partly the rationale for the production of the book,” Bexell says.

“Scientists now believe biodiversity loss may pose the greatest threat to human survival and this issue requires our urgent attention.”

 

 

 

Giant Pandas: Born Survivors

By Zhang Zhihe and Sarah Bexell

Published by the Penguin Group 

Available at major bookshops, Bt1,557