Giant pandas are returning Friday to Zoo Atlanta. Here are 5 things to know.

Giant pandas are back at Zoo Atlanta after a two-year hiatus, making their public debut Friday.

Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, both 6 years old, arrived from China six weeks ago on a FedEx transit plane and have been acclimating to their new environment.

China began gifting giant pandas to U.S. zoos in the 1970s, followed by short-term loans in the 1980s, then longer-term rental agreements in the 1990s. Zoo Atlanta, after a 12-year campaign, convinced China to lend the zoo Lun Lun and Yang Yang in 1999, committing $10 million over 10 years to China’s conservation efforts and building a $7 million living space for the two young pandas.

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Over 25 years, Lun Lun and Yang Yang bred seven offspring while boosting attendance at Zoo Atlanta. China extended its initial deal with Zoo Atlanta an additional 15 years until 2024, when it brought the 27-year-old geriatric pandas home.

Zoo Atlanta executives said goodbye to the pandas without a firm commitment that they’d get any more, but Raymond King, chief executive at the zoo since 2010, had faith.

He negotiated a new 10-year agreement for two new pandas. China had previously done the same with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and the San Diego Zoo, the two other panda homes in the United States.

“We’ve had an excellent relationship with China going back 25 years,” King said. “It’s very collaborative. We support each other.”

The past few weeks leading to this opening day of sorts has King “tired but excited.”

Here are five key things to know about the new pandas:

The newbies are like older teenagers

Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, flown in from Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China, are adjusting to their new surroundings. So far, so good, King said. They first spent time becoming familiar with the staff who care for and feed them 24/7. Over time, the zoo introduced staff members who acted like tourists, including King himself.

King said their personalities are already evident.

“Ping Ping is more adventurous than Fu Shuang,” King said. “He’s settled in very quickly and explores a lot. He is a goofball. Fu Shuang is more reserved. She isn’t nervous, just not as outgoing as he is.”

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Larger panda habitat

The two-year break gave Zoo Atlanta time to upgrade the Arthur M. Blank Panda Grove using a $6 million grant from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. The designers of the panda habitat more than doubled the size of the primary living spaces where Lun Lun and Yang Yang had lived for a quarter century. The panda overseers rotate the two bears between two dens, each 14,000 square feet.

“It’s all new,” King said. “Different climbing structures and water features. The outdoor habitats are in the same space but also have new climbing structures.”

Pandas are solitary creatures, King said, so the two pandas are separated. They might fight if left alone in an enclosed space.

Odds are when attendees see the pandas, they’ll either be sleeping or munching on multiple varieties of bamboo, which Zoo Atlanta sources from all over metro Atlanta.

Brandie Smith, director of the National Zoo who curated pandas for seven years, said most pandas she has worked with over the years “love the attention. They seem happiest when all the visitors are around them.”

She was so enchanted by the pandas, she wrote a book called “In the Company of Pandas,” set to be released Tuesday, recounting her stories of taking care of them.

“They are so adorable,” she said. “They’re almost perfectly designed in a way that humans are drawn to them.”

Will the pandas begin making babies soon?

Both Ping Ping, the male, and Fu Shuang, the female, are about the age where they can mate.

But getting them to make babies is no easy task. Females ovulate just once a year for one to three days. Zoos have struggled over the years to get pandas to mate, ensure pregnancy and keep young cubs alive.

“As a species, pandas have been around for millions of years,” Smith said. “So you can’t blame the pandas. It’s our relative lack of understanding of their reproductive cycles. It took awhile for us to know what we know now.”

There are about 900 pandas in captivity, most in China, with 69 of them out of the country, including the two in Atlanta, according to a Chinese official this week at the Global Panda Partners 2026 conference. The wild population has grown to about 1,900.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a worldwide environmental network of governments and private organizations that focuses on nature conservation, reduced the status of giant pandas from “endangered” to “vulnerable” in 2016.

Improved viewing area

“The whole plaza leading up to the habitat used to be closed in with a lot of dark wood,” King said. “It’s now much more open. It has a more reflective, contemplative garden feel. It’ll be a better experience for everyone.”

There may be long lines to see the pandas the first few weeks, King warned. But Zoo Atlanta members will receive early access Saturday through Nov. 22. (The zoo will open late Friday at 10:30 a.m. because of an invite-only VIP ceremony at 8 a.m.)

Pandas don’t eat bacon but bring home the bacon

Going two years without pandas has cost Zoo Atlanta attendance, King said. After hitting 1 million visitors in 2024, the year the previous pandas left, attendance fell to about 900,000 last year and may struggle to reach that number this year even with a late-year panda boost.

He hopes the zoo will draw 1 million again in 2027.

“Pandas are clearly our most popular animal,” King said. “It’s an iconic animal and only three zoos in the country have them, so people come from all over to see them.”