The cubs arrived less than an hour apart. The cubs, the first giant pandas born in the U.S.in 2016, are the second pair of twins for Lun Lun.
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Officials say Lun Lun was artificially inseminated in March.
In this photo provided by Zoo Atlanta, Lun Lun, a giant panda, tends to one of twin pandas in Atlanta.
The zoo plans to employ a cub swapping method of rearing.
In China, twin panda cubs, a male and a female, were born at a breeding research base in southwest Sichuan province on August 9, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Also, world conservation leaders downgraded the status of giant pandas from “endangered” to “vulnerable”. All of Lun Lun’s and Yang Yang’s cubs have been the result of artificial insemination. The rarest member of the bear family, with roughly 1,864 in the wild, live mainly in bamboo forests high in the mountains of western China. Their father, 18-year-old Yang Yang, and 3-year-old sisters Mei Lun and Mei Huan remain in their usual habitats and will not be introduced to the cubs.
Almost 2,000 giant pandas are now believed to exist in the wild, and a majority of those individuals are adults.
Nicknaming them the “dynamic duo”, Zoo Atlanta posted photographs of the tiny cubs on Facebook.
The zoo’s website says, “The first cub that we were able to swap out was actually her firstborn (called Cub A for now)”.
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