Two of Mei’s cubs have lived past infancy, 10-year-old Tai Shan and 2-year-old Bao Bao.
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But on Sunday, zoo officials were almost giddy. “Until these cubs are both out, walking around, acting normal, that’s when we will exhale”. She’s nursing the Cubs and taking care of them, as she always does. When away from its mother, the other cub will be monitored in an incubator. Only a set born in 2013 at the Atlanta zoo has survived. The cub was born at 5:35 p.m. Mei Xiang reacted by picking the cub up. Not only was one cub born, but two. She will stay at the zoo until she is four years old when she will return to China.
– What could be better than one panda cub? TWO.
“Mei Xiang always throws us for a loop”, one National Zoo team member said at a press conference Sunday morning, adding that the exhausted team is going “on adrenaline”, according to the Smithsonian.
The second cub that came five hours later wasn’t completely unexpected.
Giant pandas give birth to twins about 50 percent of the time, said Neiffer.
Roads and railways cut through the bamboo forests they depend upon in China’s Yangtze Basin, their primary habitat.
“It’s very rare, obviously, for them to manage two cubs”.
Of the six sites in the U.S. where researchers are trying to figure out how to integrate unmanned aircraft into civilian airspace, only North Dakota’s can fly high both day and night. At the time, she was compared to the size of a stick of butter. “She just kept fumbling with them”. Public access to the cubs at the zoo remains several months away. And that was just for the first birth. They are blind, and pink in color, with wispy white fur. After her water broke, Mei Xiang was laying on her back in a narrow cage. So much so that the birthing was watched live by panda lovers all around the globe. In addition to Bao Bao, Mei Xiang and the new cub, the zoo is also home to an adult male panda named Tian Tian.
She said, “right now Mei Xiang is doing a great job with the cubs, one at a time”.
The male was specifically selected due to their ideal genetic diversity, the zoo said.
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The zoo announced the surprising second delivery by mother Mei Xiang late Saturday, about five hours after kicking off regionwide excitement with news of the first cub.
