Some of China's giant pandas are on the move, jetting off to new locations where their keepers hope the rare animals will soon be exchanging loving glances with significant others.
The program is being conducted to maintain diversity in the endangered species' gene pool.
Three giant pandas left the Beijing Zoo on Wednesday for the Wolong Giant Panda Nature Reserve in southwest China's Sichuan Province. In exchange, three of the animals from Wolong will be flown to Beijing on Friday to begin settling into their new digs at the zoo.
The exchange program is the first of its kind. "It is absolutely a good thing and should have been done earlier," said Wang Song, of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Extended inbreeding among giant pandas in the same areas leads to degeneration of the species, and is a significant risk in animals as rare as the giant panda. The danger of excessive inbreeding among captive animals is well known, but even for pandas in the wild there is a risk, as the reserves they inhabit are scattered and there is little intermixing of populations.
The pandas from the Beijing Zoo are named Yuanyuan, Yingying and Tiantian. The first two are male and were born in 1999 and 1991, while Tiantian, a female, was born last year.
Dadi and Gugu are the two older animals moving from Wolong to the capital. Yinghua, like her counterpart, was born in 2003.
The older animals are scheduled to remain in their new abodes for 15 years, while the young cubs will stay for 25.
A survey completed earlier this year estimates the number of giant pandas in the wild at more than 1,590, up from 1,100 in 1988. More than 90 percent of giant pandas live in 60 nature reserves.
(China Daily October 21, 2004)
