Last week, a very special baby panda made its appearance at the Vienna Zoo – it was cute, furry, really small (just 100 grams) … and a bit of an anomaly. That’s because its birth represented only the third successful attempt to breed the endangered species naturally in Europe (you can get a glimpse of the newborn cub right here).
With fewer than 2000 pandas left in the wild in isolated mountain ranges in south-central China, captive breeding is considered crucial for saving the species. But there’s just one small problem: pandas are notoriously fussy when it comes to procreation … and they're even fussier when in captivity. Females have a truly tiny ovulation window (it's more like a fertility flash that lasts just 24 to 72 hours) – so getting males to perform when the time is just right can be the difference between copulatory fireworks and a long bout of celibacy until the next breeding season rolls round. Sadly, male pandas are not known for their sexual savvy. Staff at some breeding centres say the bears often prefer sleep to sex (and let's not even go into their 'disappointing' anatomy). Thanks to these prudish panda ways, only about 40% of all successful breeding attempts are the result of 'natural' mating.
“Getting male pandas to perform when the time is just right can be the difference between copulatory fireworks and a long bout of celibacy until the next breeding season rolls round”
Since the birth of the first cub in captivity in 1963, scientists have put in years of research to work out the ‘bear’ necessities of panda sex in an effort to improve these dismal breeding stats. They've scrutinised tricky hormonal cycles, perfected artificial insemination techniques and invented some (often downright bizarre) strategies to entice the bears away from bamboo snacking towards more amorous pursuits – we're talking panda porn, Viagra and even sexercise classes to encourage pandas to flex their pelvic muscles and assume the correct mating position. And now, new research has identified one more sexual quirk that could help boost that lacklustre libido: the scent of competition turns pandas on.
When that fleeting reproductive window opens up, male pandas can be more easily coerced into copulating if they're exposed to the smell of a rival. Working with 11 genetically unrelated adult males at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda (CCRCGP), researchers found that their subjects became much more motivated and paid far more attention to their mates when they could detect the whiff of potential competition in the air. "Our data suggest that exposing males to the odor of other males may be a useful technique to enhance captive breeding in this endangered species," they note in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE.
With one more weapon to add to the panda-breeding arsenal, perhaps there's hope for those reproductively challenged bears yet ... and Vienna Zoo's newborn cub may not be such an anomaly for much longer.
Habitat Destruction
