Lady panda ‘abducted’ for gene diversity
Print Edition
Lu Xin was seized after collapsing from hunger and sickness along a country road in Luding County, Sichuan Province. The lady panda has never returned home.
Six years after being taken, Lu Xin is now a mother far from the mountains where she grew up, raising a healthy cub along with her mate. Her ability to adapt to life in the new environment is being hailed as an innovation among national efforts to rekindle the population of the endangered species.
“I guess Lu Xin is happy with her new life,” said Huang Yan, deputy chief engineer at the China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Panda, which perpetrated Lu Xin’s unexpected move in March 2009.
“This is our first success in increasing gene diversity of small isolated panda communities by introducing outsiders,” he said.
Lu Xin was 5 when she was spotted in distress by a rural passerby. Veterinarians said Lu Xin suffered from severe dehydration caused by infection of the digestive tract. After her recovery, the wild panda was relocated to Liziping Nature Reserve in Xiaoxiangling Mountains, 100 kilometers away from her home in Qionglai Mountains.
Habitat loss and fragmentation have separated panda groups in nature. Huang said China has at least 30 isolated groups each with a small population of less than 50 pandas. Pandas in such small communities have limited mating options, thus have a high possibility of inbreeding. It may lead to birth defects and, even worse, death of newborns.
As a panda in her reproductive prime, Lu Xin was assigned a tough job to find a mate among unacquainted guys in the 30-wild panda community in Xiaoxiangling Mountains.
Lu Xin is one of the first to be relocated for such purposes. Her success or failure in finding acceptance in the group and mothering a kid is a tipping point for Huang’s research.
A sensing device, or an ID chip, was implanted under her skin and a GPS collar was put around her neck. With a bit homesickness, Lu Xin disappeared into the bamboo in late April 2009.
Up to 12 researchers have kept a watchful eye on her with the help of radio positioning tools and infrared monitoring cameras since the day she was released.
It’s best that human contact is kept to a minimum, but the collar was abandoned by Lu Xin, for unknown reasons, several months later. Huge efforts went into recovering the data. Thanks to the sensing chip, they distinguished Lu Xin from the pack of pandas and replaced the collar.
One year later, the researchers went to check on her health, attempting to re-capture her by placing familiar bamboo dishes in a cage.
When they checked on the cage, they found Lu Xin had been captured but managed to dig a hole into the ground and escaped.
In 2011, eventually, they caught her and performed the physical.
Years passed, Huang and his colleagues scarcely saw Lu Xin via their infrared cameras. To their surprise, six photos and two videos recorded in March and May 2014 revealed Lu Xin gave birth to a panda cub.
Extracting and analyzing DNA from the mother and cub’s feces, they ran DNA tests.
“After more than one year’s investigation, we found that Lu Xin has married a local wild panda named LZP 54, and gave birth to a baby in August 2012,” said Yang Xuyu, head of Sichuan’s Wild Animal Preservation Station.
“The success means it’s feasible to build up a population in small panda communities by sending ‘strangers’ to different groups,” Huang said.
Lu Xin cares for her young in hopes that it will thrive. Huang and his colleagues quietly guard them for the thriving.
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