Science: Pandaring

Aiding nature

"In all the encounters, it was obvious that the male and female were excited and sexually interested in each other. She was willing and he was anxious, but they just couldn 't coordinate their efforts."

No, this is not an excerpt from the latest report on human sexual inadequacy by Masters and Johnson. It is the director of Washington's National Zoo, Theodore Reed, explaining why the capital's popular pair from Peking, the giant pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, have failed to produce offspring in three years of bumbling attempts.

Last week the zoo took matters into its own hands. Her bleating and scent marking tipped off officials that the female Ling-Ling was in heat, an event that lasts a scant five days each spring. So a team of 13, including Head Veterinarian Mitchell Bush and Anesthesiologist Michael Abramowitz of the Washington, D.C., Children's Hospital, gathered around the lady. Ling-Ling was anesthetized, then inseminated with approximately 3.2 cc of semen that had been collected from Hsing-Hsing last year and frozen. (Fresh semen had been collected from Hsing-Hsing shortly before the insemination, but the sperm count was considered too low for conception.) To improve the odds that the artificial union would work, the team inseminated Ling-Ling again 24 hours later.

The gestation period for pandas is about five months, and it will take almost 4½ months for the first signs of pregnancy to appear—a swelling of Ling-Ling's breasts as she gets ready to nurse. Thus far only the Chinese have successfully bred a panda by artificial means. But such human intervention is becoming increasingly prudent. In the past five years, earthquakes and the natural disappearance of their major food, the arrow bamboo, have killed at least a tenth of China's giant pandas. Today only about 1,000 remain in the wild. ½