DEL.ICIO.USFate of China’s wild pandas still unknown months after quake
Survey expeditions planned for fall in devastated areas
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, September 18, 2008
CHENGDU, China — Months after an earthquake devastated south-central China, scientists are struggling to restore the world’s premier research program on the giant panda and assess the disaster’s impact on pandas in the wild.
Nearly 70,000 people died in the earthquake that struck Sichuan province in May. The quake also disrupted research and breeding programs for the critically endangered panda and affected more than 80 percent its wild habitat.
Craig Simons/Cox Newspapers
Sarah Bexell, a former Zoo Atlanta employee who now works for a panda research base in China, is one of many people worried that China’s May earthquake may have taken a heavy toll on the world’s few remaining wild pandas.
Craig Simons/Cox Newspapers
Ze Yun, a 16-year-old giant panda, was evacuated from a mountainous area of China’s Sichuan province after an earthquake in May.
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Months later, data is only beginning to filter in from field stations about the impact on hundreds of pandas living in the most heavily damaged areas.
“The situation for wild giant pandas was delicate even before the earthquake, so it’s possible that the damage could threaten their long-term survival,” said Hou Rong of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. “It’s critical that we get more information.”
Fewer than 1,600 wild panda are thought to remain in remote sections of China. Nearly half of them live in the Min Mountains, a range at the epicenter of the May earthquake. Others live in nearby mountainous areas that were rocked by the quake, though damage was less severe.
Hou and other experts worry that some wild giant pandas were likely hurt or killed in the earthquake and hundreds of violent aftershocks.
Driving through the mountains west of Chengdu, the scale of the devastation is obvious: In many places whole mountainsides collapsed into valleys, leaving long scars of rock and earth.
The damage caused by the earthquake may prove more serious to wild pandas over coming months. Hou estimates that almost one-third of plant life in the worst-hit areas was destroyed, making it harder for pandas — which live almost entirely on bamboo — to find food.
The food shortage could be particularly hard on pregnant mothers. The earthquake struck toward the end of the breeding season and stress caused by the shaking and its aftermath “might have a negative affect on the number of births” in the wild, Hou said.
To clear up some of the uncertainties, researchers are planning to survey several wild panda habitats this fall.
‘Highly fragmented population’
A longer-term concern is that the earthquake may have separated pandas from each other, making it difficult for them to find mates. Since the 1950s, roughly half of the panda’s range has been lost to deforestation.
Roads and farms have fragmented remaining pockets of forest and in some areas there are only one or two pandas. Giant pandas normally live alone except during breeding.
“The panda population is tiny and they are so highly fragmented and there’s so much human population pressure,” said Sarah Bexell, a scientist and former Zoo Atlanta employee who is director of conservation education at the Chengdu base. “What we’re worried about is that more fragmentation could have happened.”
The earthquake also stressed scores of captive pandas in Sichuan. At the Wolong Nature Reserve, 12 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter, enclosures housing nearly 50 pandas were badly damaged.
One panda at the center — a 9-year-old male named Mao Mao — was killed when a wall collapsed. Two other pandas fled through breaks in their pens and one remains missing.
Because getting food and medical supplies to the Wolong center was difficult, almost all of the pandas were eventually moved, a trip that required long hours of jarring transport over heavily damaged roads.
“When they first got here they weren’t used to the weather,” said Zhang Xin, their 25-year-old keeper. “It was too hot, so we had to use more air-conditioning.”
The earthquake had startled them and keepers used “loving-heart care” — a method developed by Chinese researchers — to calm agitated animals by talking with them and petting them.
A 16-year-old named Ze Yun (Purple Cloud) was among the pandas brought to the Chengdu research center, where Lun Lun and Yang Yang, the adult pandas now at Zoo Atlanta, were born.
“They were upset by the travel and the new environment, so we had to make them comfortable,” Zhang said as he pushed bamboo through a metal gate to Ze Yun.
China regards pandas both as a national treasure and de facto ambassadors to dozens of nations that have panda enclosures at zoos. In the United States, Zoo Atlanta, the San Diego Zoo, the Memphis Zoo and the National Zoo in Washington D.C. have pandas on loan from China.
15 cubs born at center this year
At the Chengdu center, the importance of protecting China’s hallmark species was highlighted by hundreds of visitors crowding around the center’s nursery. So far this year, pandas at the base have given birth to 15 cubs and six of the infants lay in a crib and incubators behind large windows.
When a football-sized panda lifted its head and yawned, a couple erupted into excited applause. Nearby, younger babies — their black-and-white fur only beginning to cover their pink bodies — elicited murmurs of wonderment.
The popular appeal of pandas has helped them become a powerful symbol for protecting the environment. The World Wildlife Fund chose to use a panda as its global logo in 1961.
“If one animal can foster conservation, it’s the panda,” said Bexell, who earned a doctorate degree from Georgia State University in 2006. “Internationally, giant pandas hold a potential key to motivating human behavior.”
Visitors watching the panda infants seemed moved to action.
Li Huipeng, a 22-year-old student visiting from northern China, said that seeing the infants and learning that fewer than 2,000 pandas remain in the wild had pressed home the need to protect the environment.
“It’s terrible that pandas have to rely on humans to keep them alive,” he said.
PANDA EXPERT SARAH BEXELL’S BIO
As a wildlife conservationist, Sarah Bexell dreamed big. Her work at Zoo Atlanta led her to China and a full-time job striving to protect giant pandas.
An Illinois native, Bexell earned a master’s degree at Georgia State University in 1998 and worked for Zoo Atlanta. Rebecca Snyder, a panda expert at Zoo Atlanta, sent Bexell to collect data on the endangered species in China’s Sichuan province.
After completing her doctorate degree in 2006, Bexell, now 38, moved full-time to Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, “to be more on the front lines of conservation issues,” she said in an interview earlier this month.
She was driven by concerns about China’s growing impact on the environment — including increasing demand for wildlife products and rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
“People don’t understand that when we destroy nature, we endanger our future as a species,” said Bexell, who lived in Buckhead and Ormewood Park while working on her doctoral thesis.
As director of conservation education at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, she oversees camps and classes aimed at fostering environmental awareness.
“Growing up, I had empathy with all sorts of animals because I saw birds and rabbits and squirrels. But here kids don’t have that,” she said. “The urgency really drives me. We could have already passed the tipping point.”
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