China has welcomed the world's first giant panda cub born to a mixed pair of captive and wild parents, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
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| Photo: Xinhua News |
Easy to hold in your palm, pink, covered in a downy layer of white fuzz from its tiny claws to its long tail, the cub was born early Monday morning in southwestern Sichuan province to 15-year-old Cao Cao, who had mated with a wild male panda earlier.
Cao Cao, the female Panda in captive at southwestern Sichuan province was left in wild (monitored using equipment by the zoologists) around March this year. And it was evident that Cao Cao mated with a wild male Panda and started showing signs of pregnancy by July 1 and went into labor on July 30.
"The cub's birth is the result of researchers' efforts to boost the health and genetic diversity of captive pandas by getting them to mate with their forest-dwelling counterparts," said Zhang Zhizhong of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda (CCRCGP) to Xinhua. With only 471 captive pandas worldwide as of the end of last year, the species is at risk of inbreeding, Xinhua said.
Babies from captive and wild parents would enrich the gene pool of the captive stock.
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| Photo: Xinhua News |
Cao Cao, born in the wild, was rescued at the age of two by the Research Centre in 2003. She has delivered six cubs in captivity, including two pairs of twins.
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| Photo: Xinhua News |
The now born female cub was a bit of a heavyweight at 216 grams than a normal newborn weight of around 150 grams. The cub's unusually high weight is to be associated with the mother's good health and appetite during pregnancy.
Giant pandas are notoriously clumsy at mating, with males said to be bad at determining when a female is in the right frame of mind and often befuddled at knowing what to do next.
In the event the animals do feel compatible, sex is frequently over too quickly to impregnate the female, who is only receptive to the proposition for two or three days a year between February and May.
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| Photo: Xinhua News |
Fewer than 2,000 giant pandas are estimated to remain in the wild, in three provinces in south-central China.
Reference: Xinhua News, South China Morning Post.
Arsha, The Lantern Team
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