Giant Pandas
Good news about conservation is always welcome, and never more so than when it concerns that most charismatic of charismatic mega-fauna, the giant panda. In 2016, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an environmental group that links governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), downgraded the international symbol of cuteness from “endangered” (meaning with a high risk of extinction in the wild) to “vulnerable” (i.e. to becoming endangered). Everyone should celebrate,” said Lo Sze Ping, the boss of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in China, a group whose logo is the cuddly-looking creature.
China has made huge efforts to promote panda-breeding over the past 30 years. But those efforts have nothing to do with the animal’s reclassification. They take place in captivity. The conservationists’ decision was based on the health of panda populations in the wild. The numbers there, according to government surveys, have increased from 1,114 in 1998 to 1,864 in the most recent panda census in 2013. This is five times as many as the number of captive pandas.
Their increase in the wild reflects improvements in the panda’s habitat, the dense bamboo forests of China’s southwest. After a period of chopping down everything in sight, the country now has 67 protected panda reserves, covering about half the animals’ range. Two-thirds of wild pandas live in them. The cost of such reservations is doubtless made lighter by the panda’s earning power – foreign zoos pay \1$m a year to rent a pair. But the government deserves credit for decades of conservation efforts.
The result is that China now has two panda populations, both increasing: the wild one, merely threatened, and the more frequently-photographed captive one. Though fewer in number, the captive pandas are much more fertile. The wild population rose by 268 between 2003 and 2013, or 17%; the captive population more than doubled, from 164 to 375. Pandas have a reputation for being hopeless at reproduction – females come into heat only a couple of days a year. But the old difficulty of getting them to breed in captivity owed at least as much to human ignorance. As knowledge of panda biology and behaviour has soared, so has the birth rate.
Unfortunately, this is making no difference to the wild population. The point of the captive breeding programme is to repopulate the wild. Pandas born in captivity undergo a two-year training process from teachers dressed in urine-soaked panda costumes, who teach them how to gather food and to be wary of people. But after years of effort only five captive-born pandas have been released. Two of them died. Two more are soon due to be introduced into the wild.
After all this, China’s government might have been expected to crow about the IUCN’s decision. It refrained. The State Forestry Administration, which supervises the panda’s habitat, even came near to criticising it. The bureau pointed out that the wild panda population is fragmented into 33 subgroups, 18 of which have just ten or fewer animals, making them “highly endangered”. Moreover, these groups are isolated from one another. This limits their gene pool and makes them disease-prone. Furthermore, the bureau said, quoting the IUCN’s research, climate change could destroy a third of panda habitat in the next 80 years.
Around the world, a sad parade of animals is travelling towards extinction, sometimes because of demand for their body parts from users of traditional Chinese medicine. The IUCN recently put another iconic species, the eastern lowland gorilla, on its endangered list. So it is heart-warming to see the panda going in the other direction. But the international symbol of conservation needs to lumber much farther from the edge of annihilation.
THE ECONOMIST