Panda cub is charming zoo visitors -- and teaching scientists

By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

In a cramped, dimly lit room, three women stare at a bank of blinking video monitors. Each of the six screens shows, from a slightly different angle, a black-and-white ball of fluff -- Tai Shan, the giant panda cub born last summer at Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

Every two minutes, at the ring of a bell, the volunteer researchers write down what the cub is doing. Ding! Sleeping. Ding! A yawn. Ding! The right front paw twitches.

For the first two months of Tai Shan's life, Zoo staff and volunteers monitored him 24 hours a day. He is one of the most closely studied pandas in history.

He's also one of the capital's biggest celebrities. Last December, when the cub made his public debut, 13,000 free tickets to see him were snapped up online in two hours. Fans lined up in subfreezing temperatures before the ticket booth opened for a chance at the additional 60 tickets handed out each day.

More than 200,000 people voted on the cub's name-Tai Shan (tie-SHON), meaning "peaceful mountain," while millions logged onto the zoo's live "panda cam."

The zoo's first surviving panda cub, and only the fourth nationwide, Tai Shan "is the culmination of a decade of collaborative research between the United States and China," David Wildt, chairman of the zoo's reproductive sciences department tells Smithsonian magazine.

In 2005, 21 cubs born in captivity survived (two in the United States, one in Japan and the rest in China), more than twice as many as survived in 2004 and more than any other year to date. That achievement, along with new panda reserves and other conservation measures in China, are upping the odds that one of the world's most endangered -- and most beloved -- creatures will survive, not just in captivity but in the wild.

As recently as two decades ago, the panda's future looked bleak. Restricted to remote, mist-shrouded bamboo forests in mountainous southwestern China, they had lost more than half of their habitat by the late 1980s. For centuries, logging and farming had pushed pandas to steeper and higher terrain. The species' population was down to an estimated 1,000 animals scattered among two dozen isolated groups.

Although another hundred or so pandas were kept in Chinese breeding centers, their reproductive rate was so low they offered little hope for replenishing dwindling numbers. By 1997, only 26 percent of captive pandas had ever bred.

These days, Tai Shan is no longer under 24-hour surveillance, but he still receives intense scrutiny. Veterinarians regularly measure and weigh him; take his temperature, respiration rate and heart rate; and record developmental milestones such as when his eyes opened (7 weeks), teeth emerged (14 weeks) and nose turned from pink to black (6 months).

In late January, the precocious 6-month-old scent-marked for the first time, a record.