Step up fight against panda disease
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E-mail China Daily, November 14, 2012
China's top wildlife experts on Tuesday called for more measures to prevent and control the spread of disease among giant pandas, after a rise this year in the number dying from abnormal or unknown causes.
Globally, 13 pandas died in captivity this year, compared with four in 2011.
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Seven giant panda cubs that were recently born sleep while meeting with the public at the Chengdu Research Base for Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, on Nov. 1, 2012. The research base showed the public on Thursday seven of the eight giant pandas that it breeded this year. [Xinhua] |
"This figure, however, does not include deaths of newborn cubs," said Zhang Zhihe, director of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Southwest China's Sichuan province. He added: "The survival rate of newborn cubs has also dropped this year."
Two cubs born prematurely died at the base, while another two died at a research institute in Shaanxi province.
Experts met in Chengdu, the provincial capital, on Tuesday for the start of a two-day annual conference of the Chinese Committee of Breeding Techniques for Giant Pandas.
Zhang Hemin, director of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, said that like humans, pandas can suffer many diseases, and known causes of death for adult pandas include cardiovascular tumors and cerebral hemorrhages.
"It's good we know these causes," he said. "We have more captive pandas and can therefore find more diseases."
When the committee was set up in 1989, there were just 92 pandas living in captivity worldwide. Today, there are 341, and many of the problems they face, including difficulty to conceive and for cubs to survive, have largely been solved.
However, as captive pandas are kept mainly at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, the Chengdu base, or the Louguantai Center for the Rescue and Breeding of Wild Animals in Shaanxi province, the rise in population density has resulted in a higher risk of infectious diseases.
Pu Anning, director of the general office at the Chengdu breeding base, said: "If a panda catches flu, other pandas fall victim, too."
To cope with the situation, the base has built the Dujiangyan Field Research Center in the foothills of Zhaogong Mountain, where six giant pandas were settled in January.
The base signed an agreement late last month with Changning county in Sichuan to build a new habitat at a bamboo forest in the county, where the Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was partly filmed.
Covering 291 hectares, the habitat, to be named Panda World, will comprise 74 hectares of forest, a lake and 58 types of bamboo.
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