Bear Necessities

"Behaviorally, there's a big difference compared to the wild panda," says Ling Lin, Chengdu's program director for the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). It works to strengthen nature reserves by teaching monitoring skills and anti-poaching law enforcement. After Xiang Xiang's death, researchers concluded retraining zoo-reared pandas for the outdoor life was impossible. Instead, they hunted for an area big enough to give captive-born cubs a rougher upbringing. "They already went to many places, but most sites they selected are close to the [earthquake] epicentre" and may now be unusable, says Ling. Landslide risks have so far prevented information-gathering on wild panda deaths or quake-damaged bamboo groves.

Fortunately, the Chinese public's growing interest in ecology - fuelled by terrible air quality, unsafe food and industrial disease clusters—has seeped into panda research too. "At first the only purpose was to breed more pandas. Gradually our goals changed to conservation," says Dr Zhang. China has increased the area of panda territory protected by nature reserves so it's now close to 80 percent of all natural panda habitat. The trigger for change was flooding that devastated Sichuan's Yangtze River industrial belt in 1998. Scientists identified upstream logging, and the resultant soil erosion, as a major contributor to the severity of the floods. Officials began to control logging and promote reforestation in the upper Yangtze region, which also helped preserve panda territory. The wild panda census of 2000-03 showed numbers improved by almost 500 bears compared to the mid-1980s, to roughly 1600 total.

Habitat fragmentation and loss is the biggest threat to wild pandas as timber disappears into China's construction boom. In the last 30 years, "more than one third of the natural habitat was lost because of farm land expansion and forest cutting," says WWF's Ling. Pandas are loners who like five to 10 square kilometers of roaming room each, according to Ling. That means the remaining territory can hold only a limited number of bears. The North Minshan mountains, where some 700 of the anti-social animals live, still has room for new neighbors. But the other wild populations are home to fewer than 30 pandas each, raising the risk of inbreeding.

Pandas are living fossils. Their eight million years of history—against a mere two million for humans - undermine claims that they're natural losers, doomed by chronic infertility and a taste for low energy food. Nonetheless, they seem set to remain an exotic diplomatic export, rather than a vibrant recovering population. Despite a successful breeding program and improved numbers of wild pandas, China's conservation efforts are far from being a black-and-white success.

© 2008