Holistic approach key to restoring panda population

SINGAPORE - The giant panda is one picky animal.

Not only are they a specialist species with strict habitat requirements, they also rely almost exclusively on bamboo for food, which has relatively low energy and nutritive qualities.

These traits, coupled with habitat loss caused by human activity, mean boosting the panda population over the past decades has been an uphill challenge.

But conservation efforts have borne fruit.

Captive and wild populations have grown rapidly due to protection policies, investment in building expertise, adaptation of conservation strategies and technologies, and research, said conservation biologist Melissa Songer of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

Calling it the "One Plan" approach, Dr Luis Neves, vice-president of animal care at Mandai Wildlife Group, said it is based on the understanding that conserving species and habitats needs to be an integrated effort.

He said conservation efforts cannot just take place in the pandas' natural habitat but also outside of it, where scientists can learn more about them.

In fact, conservation of pandas in captivity has been so successful that the current number of pandas in human care is sustainable, with sufficient genetic diversity to reproduce in the long term, he added.

Populations in captivity typically act as assurance populations, where the animals are kept under human care, safe from threats in the wild until an appropriate time to take them back into the wild.

As for pandas in the wild, postdoctoral researcher Thomas Connor of the University of California, Berkeley, noted that they do not have trouble mating and a mature female can have a cub every two years.

Dr Connor, who studied wild panda populations in Sichuan, China, for his PhD, said pandas with adequate bamboo forest habitats can see population growth rates rival or even surpass that of other bear species.

Dr Songer highlighted important contributions to the science that helped boost panda populations in human care.

"Major advances in veterinary care and reproductive techniques to improve monitoring hormones to detect pregnancy, artificial insemination, and cryopreservation of gametes (reproductive cells) contribute not only to giant pandas but other species as well," she added.

This was the case with efforts to get giant pandas Kai Kai and Jia Jia to bear a cub.

Dr Neves said other species under Mandai Wildlife Group's care have benefited, with assisted reproduction skills and methods - first improved for the pandas - now applied to other species such as large cats and large apes.

For instance, monitoring the hormone levels of animals has allowed keepers to have a better understanding of the breeding cycles of the animals under their care.

But panda conservation has also drawn some criticism.

A recent study argued that other threatened species have suffered habitat loss as a result of retaining the panda's natural habitat.

Dr Songer said that while the potential effects of losing a single species are largely unknown, the loss of any species can have cascading effects through an ecosystem.

"Our best hope is to work towards 'saving all the pieces' since we can't know what will happen when a particular species disappears," she said.

WWF Singapore's deputy director for conservation Uma Sachidhanandam said: "Public attention garnered from the pandas' success stories can also encourage others to prioritise and take action for various other endangered species."