Mei Xiang’s surviving panda cub is an active, healthy male and “overall looks great”, National Zoo said Thursday, a day after her smaller twin cub, also a male, had died.
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After an ultrasound revealed a possible pregnancy a week ago, zookeepers were greeted with another surprise Saturday when 17-year-old panda Mei Xiang gave birth to not one but two baby cubs.
The smaller of the two cubs died on Wednesday at the zoo in the U.S. capital.
The researchers compared the cubs’ genetic profiles to those of Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and Hui Hui, and found that Tian Tian was the best match, the zoo said. Mei Xiang arrived at the zoo in 2000 and has given birth to two surviving cubs, Bao Bao and Tai Shan, who has since been returned to the motherland.
[Panda gives birth to twins hours apart]. Because the cub was both bottle and tube fed, it’s likely that’s what caused the food to enter his lungs. The habitat is capable of supporting four bears, meaning it will be fully booked until 2017, when Bao Bao, the female cub born in 2013, is sent to China, which legally owns all giant pandas everywhere.
Even though the zoo now knows the cub is male, the zoo still hasn’t given him a name yet, reported the NPR. He will share Mei Xiang’s panda den for now but will eventually be separated to avoid fighting with mom as he grows up.
The zoo’s first pair of pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, have been a present from China following President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 go to to the nation.
Giant pandas, which are native to China, have a very low reproductive rate, especially in captivity. The pair had five cubs while living at the zoo but none survived. Tai Shan was born in 2005 and lives in China.
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“We’re ecstatic about that”, Robert Fleischer, head of the zoo’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics, said at a news conference.
