Close your eyes, and imagine, if you will, the one animal that symbolizes the plight of endangered species across the globe. Did you see a panda? If so, it’s no surprise, because 1) you clicked on an article about pandas, and 2) the iconic bear has been a symbol of the world’s fight against extinction for well over fifty years. Last month, the IUCN announced that dedicated conservation efforts have proven effective; the giant panda is no longer listed as endangered (it’s currently “vulnerable”). This is a huge victory for an animal that, in some circles, continues to be inappropriately criticized as “relic species.”
In light of this incredible news — and to continue conversation about a subject which is both complicated and nuanced — we set out to unpack just how a species once clinging to the brink of existence is now, if not thriving exactly, in the midst of a remarkable recovery.
1. “PANDAS WON’T BREED TO SAVE THEMSELVES” – AND YET, HERE WE ARE
Earlier this year we wrote a story about Ami Vitale’s photographs of the giant panda in China, which ran in National Geographic. In it, Vitale discusses the strides that panda researchers have made in successfully breeding an animal that has long been a source of puzzlement for researchers. It’s hard to imagine now, but at one time, the panda’s legendary “unwillingness” to breed in human care was so baffling to biologists that there were attempts to inspire them into action by using videos. Yes, “Panda porn.” Creative as this attempt was, it didn’t work. What did work, was looking at the problem from several different angles.
2. “YOU’LL LEARN THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEVER KNEW” – WISE WORDS FROM DISNEY’S POCOHANTAS
If you’ll remember from our previous discussion of the species, the panda is (and was) such an illusive animal that it features in exactly zero known paintings by Chinese artists prior to the twentieth century. Experts at melting silently into the bamboo, the bears maintained an aloofness from humankind that ensured little was known about them — so much so that the West didn’t even recognize their existence until 1869. Sure enough, it was the encroachment of human spaces on panda habitat that began to reveal the bears to the wider public (both in China and abroad). It is a testament to the panda’s considerable powers of camouflage that it took until 1936 for the first living panda to make its debut at the Brookfield Zoo, courtesy of American socialite, clothing designer, and explorer, Ruth Harkness. The arrival of Su-Lin set off a nearly instantaneous panda-mania in America, and it’s easy to see why. Striking in coloration, a symphony of gamboling, bamboo-eating roundness, pandas look as if they were engineered in a lab for maximum crowd appeal.
For all their charms, pandas weren’t, it seemed, engineered to breed quickly. It would be 27 years after Su-Lin’s entrance into American society that anyone would have luck in producing cubs in a captive breeding program (that would be in China, at Beijing Zoo). Not until the 1960s would China establish the first four panda reserves and issue a decree banning the hunting of the species, and it would take a decade more for the Ministry of Forestry to undertake a census that would confirm the bear’s precarious position on the planet. Think about that for a second. The first panda most Americans would ever have a chance to see — the first one to truly alert the West to the existence of the species as a whole — was introduced a mere thirty-four years prior to the first harbingers of their extinction.
A concentrated effort to study pandas in the wild did not truly gear up until 1980. That didn’t give scientists in China, the US, or elsewhere a great deal of time to study and understand their behavior prior to implementing a plan to save the species.
Meghan S. Martin-Wintle, PhD, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the San Diego Zoo Global Institute for Conservation and Research, and the Director of PDXWildlife, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting and restoring species and habitat diversity, elaborates:
Conservationists usually pull these species into captive breeding programs when the fate of the species is already in a pretty dire state. This often means we know very little about the species’ natural history and often don’t have examples, or haven’t learned all the nuances of, their breeding behaviors. Giant pandas in particular are so elusive and hard to locate that we’ve only just begun to reliably track them to study their breeding behavior in the wild. Very few of these natural breedings have been witnessed and so I think it’s really hard to say what the “normal” success rate is for a breeding. For all we know, the rates we were seeing in captivity (even in the beginning) could have been completely “normal” and we may be well above “normal” now. We just don’t have enough data to say.
There was no wealth of field notes to pull from, no catalogs of observation, no history of success from which to draw. There was nothing to compare to. Once zoos, reserves, and affiliated biologists got serious about breeding pandas in an effort to bolster a failing wild population, they had to do so with the understanding that they would be learning on the job. The species depended on the passion and cooperation of people that were willing to be humbled and frustrated, but never put off, by a mystery that demanded to be solved (even as its data-pool disappeared).
3. A SMALL WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
As human encroachment continued to narrow the panda’s long-time habitat, scientists discovered that the bear itself had only narrow opportunities to breed in the wild. Female pandas “ovulate just once a year, in the spring,” and what’s more, “the window that a male panda has to inseminate the female while she has an egg ready to go is only about 36 to 40 hours.” (Some sources suggest up to 72 hours, which, nevertheless, isn’t a great deal of time).
While this slim window of estrus may not have posed an issue for an animal with a widespread historic range throughout southern and eastern China, Myanmar and northern Vietnam, it certainly presents an issue for animals “restricted to around 20 isolated patches of bamboo forest in six mountain ranges in China’s Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces.”
To preserve the panda, conservationists would have to ensure that wild habitats were linked by corridors, protected, and expanded, offering the bears opportunities to find each other, and ensure that animals in human care were offered opportunities to breed at the appropriate time in the female’s cycle.
4. MAKING SENSE OF SCENTS
But what does that appropriate time look like? How does a researcher know when that time is? For that matter — and more importantly — how does a male panda know when that time is? Simply introducing a male bear to a female bear would not guarantee a successful breeding in a species that is, according to panda researcher Ronald Swaisgood, “solitary by nature, rarely meeting face-to-face as they traverse their home ranges through dense bamboo forests. Indeed, they appear to make great effort to avoid encountering one another throughout most of the year.”
If you’re by nature a solitary female bear, and you’re only interested in breeding up to 72 hours out of an entire year, you probably won’t be meeting another bear with a seat at your table, a cup of tea, and plate of bamboo the vast majority of the time. You’re meeting him with bared teeth or a turned tail. Outside of those 72 hours he represents, at best, a stranger that can’t benefit you at all, and at worst, competition for resources or a danger to the cub you already have on the ground. For the most part, neither of you want the other around. A confrontation means loss of energy, resources, and possible injury. Avoidance is best practice.
So the animals in the wild, would, of course, have to have a way of signaling to each other when an appropriate time to approach would be. It follows, then, that understanding how and what a female panda did to signal her receptiveness to a male in the wild would be a huge boon to understanding panda reproduction in zoos.
Says Dr. Martin-Wintle:
We didn’t know how to incorporate the giant panda’s natural mating system well into a captive setting when the captive breeding program first got started (probably where the “pandas are notoriously bad breeders” myth got started). Once we paid a little more attention to social conditions prior to breeding and physiological indicators of estrus we became much better at breeding. The first major breakthrough was realizing that pandas use chemical signals well before actual estrus to communicate impending estrus.
She points to Swaisgood’s early work; “a series of systematic investigations aimed at unraveling the mysteries of chemical communication in [the] species,” as part of that breakthrough. Swaisgood’s studies found “that males can readily discriminate female reproductive condition on the basis of chemical cues, and that urine contains chemical constituents that change across the estrus cycle. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that female urine, and perhaps other scents…serve a reproductive advertisement function.” He concluded that the “results suggest a clear role in the application of chemical communication for captive breeding programs.”
Basically: The secret was in their pee, which acted as a signal. Some of the science gets pretty science-y here, so let’s unpack into grossly (and uhhh, not entirely parallel) human terms. Let’s say that “pen swapping” (allowing the two animals to exchange habitats and sniff out all of the scents left behind by each other) is something like getting the go ahead to read your date’s thoroughly written and entirely truthful dating profile while sitting inside their apartment, at their computer, which is not password-protected. (Only in this case, it’s not creepy, because you guys are pandas). This is probably going to give you a way better idea of whether or not you’re interested in the other person, than being introduced by a very well-meaning and well-researched matchmaker who knows, on paper, you’re perfect for each other, looks at the two of you, nods in affirmation, and says, “Now, KISS!”
Years of panda breeding practices had all been the clumsy-human-matchmaker variety. But pen swapping was actually a very subtle form of flirting, and the results were dramatic. Which brings us to the next breakthrough in panda reproduction.
5. THE DATING GAME
If we were to expand on our metaphor above, wouldn’t it be even better if you were allowed to check out the apartments and dating profiles of more than one potential partner? Wouldn’t you get more excited about the entire situation? Wouldn’t The Bachelorette be a way different show if there was only one dude competing, as opposed to a string of them? What if the one guy on the show just didn’t do anything for the bachelorette?
Well, it turns out, the same is true for panda ladies. You may recall from our previous article on panda breeding that the Wolong breeding center discovered that female “pandas are picky. They’re not going to sleep with just anybody. They need a sexy male.”
Dr. Martin-Wintle agreed with the Wolong center’s findings, saying, “we had inadvertently all but eliminated mate choice in many breeding centers by focusing so intently on matching pairs for “genetic compatibility.” Researchers would match bears based on their genetic information, in the hopes of producing healthy, sound, and genetically diverse cubs, but frequently found their plans stymied when the female showed no interest in her intended. This disappointing result was part of the inspiration behind one of Martin-Wintle’s research projects, in which she and a team examined the mating behaviors of roughly 40 pandas at the Bifengxia Chinese Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda.
At the center, male and female pandas were given the ability to interact with two different potential partners, via the use of “howdy” windows and barred gates, which allowed them to see, smell, and hear each other. The researchers would monitor the bears’ interactions, and determine “preferences” based on “pre-mating behaviors, like scent marking, urination, chirping, erections (for males), raising their tail (for females), and so on.” If the pandas growled, barked, or in any other way displayed aggression toward a potential partner, that was noted too.
The study found that “mating success and cub production are dramatically enhanced when an individual male or female showed a strong preference – directing more than 60 percent of its pre-mating behaviors towards one of the two choices.” In fact, if you’re reading closely, you’ll find that preference wasn’t simply important for female pandas alone, but males as well. While the male panda plays no role in raising the cub, his ability to choose a breeding partner is an important part in the viability of a potential mating.
And, it turns out, so may some healthy competition. Martin-Wintle says, “My post-doctoral work is focusing on the next step, which is allowing male giant pandas to have “competition.” We place them in neighboring pens for a little while and let them have limited interactions through mesh windows prior to mating, similar to their mating in the wild.”
Combining the relatively newfound understanding of the giant panda’s natural breeding behaviors with these strategies has lead to the current rate for successful breeding in human care, which she says is “as high as 75%.” That’s a pretty impressive statistic for a species still battling that unfair and oversimplified reputation of being “unwilling to breed to save itself.”
6. PUZZLE PIECES
Breeding programs are only one piece of the puzzle which have allowed the giant panda to succeed to this point.
Says Dr. Martin-Wintle:
The efforts made by the Chinese in restoring the giant panda population and their habitat (funded in large part by the revenue brought in by the captive breeding bases, tourism, and loaning pandas as ambassadors to zoos around the world) has helped the giant panda wild population rebound to [the point of being delisted from endangered to vulnerable]. As an umbrella species, the protection of the giant panda has helped SO many other species that coexist in their habitat. In addition, conducting research on the giant panda helped us realize that we need to focus on behaviors and natural history of a species for successful captive breeding.
The Chinese government, in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund, first established the Wolong National Nature Reserve in 1980. They cracked down on the trade of panda skins and continued to add protected spaces for the bear. Today, the protected habitat covers 1400 square kilometers, and is growing, right alongside the wild panda population, which added nearly 270 animals to its number in ten years. (Which may not sound like a huge amount, but we’re remembering, again, that small window of breeding opportunity).
In a September interview with the BBC, Craig Hilton-Taylor, Head of the IUCN Red List said, “It’s all about restoring the habitats. Just by restoring the panda’s habitat, that’s given them back their space and made food available to them.”
The same interview cited Ginette Hemley, senior vice-president for wildlife conservation at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who noted that, “The Chinese have done a great job in investing in panda habitats, expanding and setting up new reserves. They are a wonderful example of what can happen when a government is committed to conservation.”
It’s a point Dr. Martin-Wintle can expand on. Recognizing that captive breeding isn’t “the only tool in the tool box,” she says, “I can build a perfectly functional table with a hammer and a nail but I can build an incredibly fabulous table with those tools plus a sander, chisel, jig, etc. Similarly, conservation biologists can probably save a species with just one of our tools (whether it be captive breeding, in situ conservation, or habitat restoration, etc) but we’ll be more much more effective if we use all the tools at our disposal in a joint effort.”
7. WE DID IT! GO TEAM! BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Panda researchers have cracked the code on captive breeding, China is serious about habitat protection, and reintroduction efforts on captive-bred pandas are looking very promising. It’s for these reasons that the charismatic bear can wave goodbye to its “endangered” designation and say hello to “vulnerable” status. With researchers like Dr. Martin-Wintle on the case, continuing to further our collective understanding of the species, and with continuing habitat expansion, isn’t our work here done? Can we pat ourselves on the back and say, at least for the panda, problem solved?
Well, not quite. The fact is, something besides panda population is on the rise: global temperatures.
According to the IUCN Red List
Whereas the decision to downlist the Giant Panda to Vulnerable is a positive sign confirming that the Chinese government’s efforts to conserve this species are effective, it is critically important that these protective measures are continued and that emerging threats are addressed. The threat of declining bamboo availability due to climate change could, in the near future, reverse the gains made during the last two decades. The Giant Panda will remain a conservation-dependent species for the foreseeable future. The Chinese government’s plant to expand existing conservation policy for the species (State Forestry Administration 2015) should receive strong support to ensure its implementation.
It’s a caveat that bears thinking about, not just for the panda, but for every endangered, threatened, and vulnerable species on the planet. If, currently, you don’t have November 8th on your mind at almost every waking hour, you are probably one of the very few. Election day is coming, and with it, the chance to influence the direction that our country is headed. The policies that our nation’s leaders implement will have very real consequences for the entire world. While researching candidates and checking boxes, it behooves all of us to be aware of our candidates’ stances on environmental issues, and to remember, after the election, that our voices can and must be heard.
Says Dr. Martin-Wintle:
Most real change needs to come from the government level, which means that the average person can help by getting involved and advocating for the endangered species through raising local awareness and pressuring government officials to make real change. In addition, people can become more involved at the policy level by writing local conservation groups and volunteering for causes. Pressuring our representatives through organizing a letter campaign around a certain issue (again, local NGOs [non-governmental organizations] can help with ideas or let people get inspired by a local hot topic). Remember, most real change comes when the general population gets fed up with a current issue and demands change at the government level (think of the real change that has happened with women’s rights, race equality, and LGBT rights). I believe we’re at this same critical point with conservation issues – citizens need to demand real change.
