The Science of Breeding
Pandas are famously difficult to breed, and for decades captivity meant decline. The first captive cub in 1963, the founding of dedicated research bases, artificial insemination, neonatal care, and at last genome sequencing turned the panda nursery into one of conservation biology's great success stories.
Part of The Giant Panda
6 moments in this segment.
- — The first captive-born cub. On 9 September 1963, Beijing Zoo records the first giant panda ever born in captivity — a male cub named Ming-Ming. It is the first crack in the panda's reputation as impossible to breed, and the beginning of a long scientific struggle to make captivity a source of new pandas rather than a drain.
- — The Chengdu panda breeding base opens. The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is founded in 1987 with just six rescued pandas. It pioneers the techniques — artificial insemination, twin-swapping, round-the-clock neonatal care — that will turn captive breeding from a string of failures into a reliable success.
- — Hua Mei — first US-born cub to survive. On 21 August 1999, Hua Mei is born at the San Diego Zoo — the first giant panda born in the United States to survive to adulthood, conceived by artificial insemination. Her survival proves that Western zoos, too, can breed pandas, and she is later repatriated to China to join the breeding programme.
- — The panda genome is sequenced. In 2010 an international team publishes the draft genome of the giant panda in Nature. It confirms the animal is a true bear, reveals why a carnivore's body subsists almost entirely on bamboo, and gives conservation geneticists a precise toolkit for managing the small, fragmented population.
- — Watch — inside a panda nursery. Footage from the Chengdu breeding base: the round-the-clock science of raising panda cubs, from incubators and twin-swapping to the costumed keepers preparing pandas for release.
- — Tao Tao — first captive-bred panda released to the wild. In October 2012 Tao Tao, raised under a "wild training" programme in which keepers wore panda costumes to avoid human imprinting, becomes the first captive-bred giant panda released into the wild. It marks the breeding programme's ultimate ambition: not just more pandas, but wild ones.
