Conservation Efforts Are Bringing Pandas, Wolves and Panthers Back from the Brink
Rachel Feltman: If I asked you to guess how many animal species are threatened with extinction right now, would you have a number in your head? Is it hundreds, thousands?
Feltman: Well, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, it’s about 17,800 of them.
While there are a few exceptions, almost every animal species that’s on the threatened list is there because of human activity. We’re clearing land and building stuff over their habitats, we’re poaching and overhunting, global warming is shifting temperatures and migration patterns—I could go on and on. But instead, let’s talk about how we humans are using science to help bring some species back from the brink of extinction.
For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. To finish up our four-part series about conservation science, which we’re calling “The New Conservationists,” we’re talking about our favorite kinds of animal stories: the comebacks!
Our guide for this adventure is Ashleigh Papp, an animal scientist turned storyteller. And for this episode, she’ll take us to Washington, D.C., where just this past fall two fuzzy new VIPs arrived from China. (I’ll give you a hint: they’re black and white and adorable all over.)
This decades-long collaboration between researchers in the U.S. and China has quite literally turned the tide for one charismatic species in particular.
Pierre Comizzoli: Pandas are kind of magic, and in terms of evolution they are so unique because they are carnivores originally, you know, like any other bears, but they evolved very differently.
Ashleigh Papp: That’s Pierre Comizzoli. He’s a research veterinarian with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
Comizzoli: They started, really, to eat bamboo to survive and to modify their diet, and, well, they don’t eat only bamboo; they also eat some small animals—but this is fantastic, how a species got really adapted to a very specific environment, which is the bamboo forest in central China.
Papp: Long ago central China had bamboo aplenty, which worked really well for the adapted pandas. But many of those bamboo forests have been cleared for development in more recent decades. As a result panda numbers have dwindled.
In 1972, when wild panda populations were hovering around 1,000, First Lady Patricia Nixon mentioned that she really loved pandas at a dinner in Beijing. Important government officials were at the table, and soon after China offered two pandas, one male and one female, to the American people. The Nixons decided that the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., would be the perfect home for them.
[CLIP: Patricia Nixon speaking about the pandas arriving at the National Zoo: “On behalf of the people of the United States, I am pleased to be here and accept the precious gift of the panda—pandas and also these other mementos from the government of the People’s Republic of China.”]
Papp: The new arrivals drew huge crowds. The zoo staff members were hoping to learn more about the pandas in captivity to help regrow the wild population. But answers turned out to be elusive. In the 20 or so years that the pandas lived at the zoo they produced five offspring, but none of the animals lived past a few days.
And it wasn’t just a problem in D.C. Everyone was experiencing a similar panda babymaking issue, which continued into the early 2000s, when Pierre joined the National Zoo team. Around then different institutions started sharing notes and collaborating to see if they could figure out what was going wrong.
Comizzoli: Only one pair of animal is not necessarily enough to understand the full spectrum of the biology of a species. And going to China was very important, because there was access to many more animals. And, of course, as you can imagine, you know, individuals are not necessarily similar. So there was the possibility to study a lot of animals and to understand what was really the needs in terms of nutrition, in terms of veterinary care and in terms of monitoring of the reproduction.
Papp: Researchers already knew that the breeding window for giant pandas is only open one time each year, usually from March to May. But what they later figured out, through their own research and a lot of collaboration, is that within the three months of opportunity, there’s an even smaller window.
Comizzoli: The female is not necessarily able to conceive during the whole breeding season. She can attract a male, but there is a very short window of time when the female can breed with the male and then conceive.
Papp: That very short window is about 24 to 72 hours maximum.
[CLIP: “None of My Business,” by Arthur Benson]
Papp: Once Pierre and his colleagues defined the female panda’s conception window within the breeding season, they needed to figure out the precise right time to bring the two pandas together and let sparks fly.
Comizzoli: What is the optimal time to put the male and the female together to make sure that there would be a successful breeding, leading then after that to a pregnancy and a baby.
Papp: In 2000 China sent over two more pandas on loan to the National Zoo. And the chemistry between these two was different.
Comizzoli: They really showed all the good signs that they liked each other, that they were ready to breed during this very short breeding season. Unfortunately, they were not really experts, and they were spending way too much time to try to adjust, you know, their positions...[full transcript]
扫码关注“领研网”微信公众号
订阅最新“科学60秒”英语新闻
不再漏掉任何一次新知 plus 练耳的机会~
