The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) has been the poster animal for conservation efforts for a long time, and is even used as the logo for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) that is doing great work to protect ecosystem and species all over the world.
The panda is actually a pretty good success story for conservation effort as well. They used to be classified as endangered by the IUCN, but got downgraded to Vulnerable during the 2016 IUCN Red List revision due to the fact that the increased conservation efforts had stopped their population decline.
A giant panda enjoying some bamboo! Image by Manyman, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
How the giant pandas stopped going extinct
Giant pandas are really cool animals, but they are also very weird in some ways. One of their biggest problems for keeping a healthy population number is their extremely restrictive breeding. Getting a giant panda pregnant is almost next to impossible, especially when animals in the wild are separated by long distances.
A female will only become fertile at the age of between 4 and 8, which is very old compared to most other species. That’s one thing, but their ovulation is crazy as well, and they only ovulate once per year after they have reached sexual maturity! Their ovulation also only lasts between 2 and 4 days, so the male has a very limited time to reach an ovulating female if he wishes to breed with her.
If the female manages to get pregnant, she will care for the cub for over three years (again, this is very long compared to most other animals), and she will not get pregnant again during this time period.
A female with her cub. Image by Manfred Werner / Tsui, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This is obviously a huge problem for the pandas, and because of this it takes a very long time to make the population increase. Luckily wildlife scientists managed to get them to breed in captivity after a long process of experimenting with this, which is pretty much the only reason why they are not about to go extinct now. Despite this, they are still limited to very few offspring, so it takes a long time to get them to a good place.
Conservationists who make sure the baby panda is healthy. Image by Colegota, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Spain license.
The pandas are currently seeing a population increase, but it is taking very long to reach the number of individuals that the conservationists and the Chinese governments aim for, which is why they recently proposed a huge national park to protect the fragmented populations!
The Giant Panda National Park
The name for the new national park will be the Giant Panda National Park, and it will be located in south-west Sichuan province. This is an area that already houses most of the wild pandas, so they will not need to release new pandas into the national park. f
The project is financed by The Bank of China who has pledged 10 billion yuan (roughly 1.5 billion USD) to create the park. That’s a lot of money, but China is very serious about the responsibility for these animals.
A total of 27,134 square kilometers is proposed to be used in the national park, which is about three times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, a park considered to be gigantic with its almost 9,000 square kilometers. Most newspapers that have written about this claims that the park will be twice the size of Yellowstone National Park, but if you do some basic math you will see that it is indeed three times the size, not two.
The hope of the national park is that the fragmented populations of giant pandas that are already living in the area will be able to breed without too much human interference, and that their population numbers will increase. Once less humans use the area for human activities, it is likely that the giant pandas will move more freely within the park, and have an easier time locating each other during the limited ovulation of the females.
Image by Johann Balleis, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
The park will not be ready until 2023 due to the fact that there already lives 170,000 residents within the area. I can’t find any good source that tells us what happens to these people, but according to The Guardian the Government hope that this allows them to make money from tourism, instead of exploiting the nature
Saving the pandas, but killing everything else
If you have been reading my blog, then you know that China is not really the best country when it comes to conservation efforts, despite the fact that they are very skilled at taking care of the pandas. A lot of Chinese people believe in traditional eastern medicine, such as bones and teeth from Panthera cats, scales from the pangolins, and rhino horns. They also love to eat the fins of sharks that are brutally killed, and up until recently they have had a legal ivory trade which was responsible for the death of over 40,000 elephants each year.
For these reasons I find it a bit paradoxal that they are such good caretakers of the pandas, but I guess it’s much better to exploit animals that live in other parts of the world. But at least it’s a good thing that they care about the pandas, or else they would have been extinct a long time ago.
Read more about pandas: New evidence suggest that Giant Pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) might originate from Europe, not China!
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