Panda on mating mission
2003-12-01 10:27
Mexico City - Shuan Shuan, one of three female giant pandas at Mexico City's Chapultepec Zoo, is scheduled to leave on Tuesday for Tokyo, where officials will try to mate her with a male panda named Ling Ling.
The Mexican capital's zoological department brought Ling Ling to Mexico City to mate with Shuan Shuan or the other female pandas at Chapultepec five times in years past, but none of those trips successfully produced offspring.
This year Mexican officials agreed to fly Shuan Shuan, born in captivity in Mexico in 1987, to Ling Ling in Japan, hoping that mating will go more smoothly in a new location.
With only about 1 000 giant pandas alive in the wild, conservationists have turned to captive breeding, artificial insemination and even research on cloning as ways of saving the animal from extinction.
About 140 giant pandas live in zoos and research centres around the world, the majority of which are located in their native China.
In 1963, Beijing witnessed the first panda birth inside a zoo and the first panda born in captivity outside of China was Tohui, born in Mexico City in 1980.
Tohui's parents were Pe Pe and Ying Ying, donated to Mexico by the government of China in 1975.
- AP