A snow-covered panda in Foping Nature Reserve, Shaanxi Province. HIT PLAY, above, to see more photos.
Credit: Fuwen Wei
A panda in Foping Nature Reserve, Shaanxi Province. HIT PLAY, above, to see more photos.
Credit: Fuwen Wei
A panda in Foping Nature Reserve, Shaanxi Province. HIT PLAY, above, to see more photos.
Credit: Fuwen Wei
On 12 May 2008, Sichuan province in China was hit by a category 8.0 earthquake, killing almost 70,000 people. At the time of the quake I was in Beijing. Like all Chinese people, I felt deeply saddened by the loss of life. On top of the human losses, I was also concerned about the welfare of my research subjects: giant pandas.
I started studying giant pandas in 1984 as a postgraduate student of the world-renowned giant panda specialist Jinchu Hu, mostly in their natural habitat in the central China provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. Since then, I have been involved in conservation efforts.
Only 60 km from the epicentre of the 2008 quake is the Wolong National Nature Reserve, one of three national breeding centres for giant panda. It is home to more than 150 captive-bred and wild pandas. All the highways in the region had been damaged during the natural disaster, resulting in massive problems for relief efforts.
I assumed the worst when I heard about the earthquake. I thought the reserve had been destroyed. It was very difficult to find out what had happened, as most of the phone towers in the area had been damaged.
But we able to assess the damage to captive pandas quickly: in total, one panda was found dead among the rubble and six pandas escaped.
HOWEVER, WE STILL DON'T know the effect, if any, of the quake on wild pandas. In March, I attended the 2010 giant panda conservation and management meeting in Sichuan, hosted by the China State Forestry Administration (SFA), to decide how we should evaluate the damage.
The meeting was attended by 50 Chinese administrators and scientists. During the meeting we discussed our plans for the future of giant panda conservation, and the SFA announced it would conduct the fourth national survey of giant pandas. The survey will begin in 2011, and will continue for two years.
The previous surveys were conducted in 1974-1977, 1985-1988 and 1998-2002. The most recent survey estimated that there are 1,600 wild pandas, plus another 266 in captivity. It is worth noting that we can only estimate the population of pandas. The world population of humans is, after all, only an estimate too.
In a 2006 article published in the journal Current Biology, my research group proposed that the number of wild pandas may be much higher than previously stated, based on a small test case. This discrepancy makes the upcoming survey even more important, and exciting.
