Big Gains for Giant Panda Conservation

We’ve come a long way with panda conservation in the past few years. This is true for both the San Diego Zoo’s program and for panda conservation science in general.

Most remarkably, the Chinese government has increased the number of panda reserves from 4 to 62 in the last decade or so. And, a global collaborative effort (with lots of San Diego Zoo leadership) helped turn around the breeding program for zoos and breeding centers. Because of this effort, the population, once believed to be almost hopeless, has more than doubled and this year will reach the relatively secure target of 300 pandas!

San Diego Zoo staff now hold the Chair positions for both the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN’s) Giant Panda Expert Team and the Association of Zoo and Aquarium’s Species Survival Plan. The recipe for success? Collaboration and synergy.

Most of the Zoo’s recent advancements have been made in a new study, following wild GPS satellite-tagged pandas in the Foping Nature Reserve in Shaanxi Province. This work is done in close collaboration with our friends and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Science. Without the aid of this modern technology, we would be hard-pressed to even find a panda, much less study it. No one has tracked pandas for well over a decade and this is the first-ever use of satellite tracking technology for pandas. Our GPS satellite collars record the panda’s location several times each day, whether we are there to see them or not.

Each new thing learned about pandas leads to a new mystery. We found a female who temporarily dispersed over 50 km during the mating season, then returned to her home range. She did the same thing the next year! Why? Is this some sort of mating strategy that we are just becoming aware of? We also learned that it is the female subadults who disperse. Our 2-year old collared female left her area of birth and moved about 20 km to set up a new home elsewhere. The other pandas stayed put. We’ve also learned that pandas’ home ranges are much, much larger than anyone realized before.

We’ve been able to find a number of mothers with cubs and installed videocameras outside their dens to record their behavior. We have seen some amazing things, like observing a mother making valiant efforts to save cubs threatened by flooding. We also surveyed the dens sites in the reserve and believe that there may not be enough quality birth dens.

Each day we learn remarkable new things about pandas, removing the mystery that has compromised our ability to conserve them.