Battling a Bamboo Crisis

A botanical quirk threatens the last pandas in the wild

Her name is Jia Jia, which means Homely Little One. As she munches on a bamboo shoot in her compound, her caretaker watches with fondness and concern. The three-year-old, 123-lb. female has only recently been taken from the wild, yet she seems to be adjusting well to captivity. Her keeper even has hopes that she will soon be able to produce young of her own. But, he insists, Jia Jia, a giant panda, is only a "guest." If all goes well, she and her brood will be set free.

Jia Jia's temporary home is not a zoo but a breeding station in the Wolong (Resting Dragon) Nature Reserve, in the thickly forested mountains of China's Sichuan province. The reserve is the center of an unusual collaborative effort of Chinese and Western scientists, mostly American. Their object: to ensure the survival of Jia Jia and the thousand or so other giant pandas still found in the wild.

The immediate threat to the giant panda is not man but nature. In their high-altitude retreats in the remote regions of central China, giant pandas survive almost entirely on bamboo. "It's 99.9% of their diet," says George Schaller, director of the Animal Research and Conservation Center at the New York Zoological Society. Schaller has been studying the pandas in their native habitat since December 1980. Unfortunately, by a curious botanical twist, a staple of their diet, the arrow bamboo, is now undergoing one of its periodic blossomings. When this happens, once every 45 or 50 years, a whole mountainside of bamboo may erupt in flowers, scatter seeds and then perish. The bamboo will regrow in a few years to sufficient size (perhaps 3 ft. high) to provide fresh food for the pandas. Meanwhile, they must scramble for other food.

In a recent survey of the Wolong region, the largest of China's twelve panda reserves and site of a joint China-World Wildlife Fund panda study project, Botanist Qin Zisheng discovered that 95% of the bamboo had already bloomed. Now the pandas, which normally eat 25 to 30 lbs. of bamboo daily, are starting to eat ordinary grasses, although apparently without much joy: Qin says an examination of panda droppings indicates that the animals are suffering from indigestion.

As whiter arrives and snow blankets the mountains, the pandas will face more than tummy aches. Two have already died. In 1975-76 a similar flower-and-die disaster involving the umbrella bamboo, which is in a different growth cycle, led to the deaths by starvation of 138 animals in a panda habitat on the border of Sichuan and Gansu provinces.

To avert a similar calamity in arrow-bamboo regions, where a sizable portion of the wild pandas dwell, Chinese scientists, aided by the World Wildlife Fund, are undertaking emergency measures. One tactic: leaving roasted pork chops and goat meat on the mountain slopes in hopes that the pandas will turn from their normal vegetarian diet. Explained Schaller: "They'll eat meat if they can get it easily." The scientists are also using meat to lure pandas to lower-lying regions where other types of bamboo may be available.

But the pandas' best hope in the long run probably lies with the Wolong Research and Conservation Center, scheduled for completion this month. Designed jointly by William Conway, director of the Bronx Zoo, and Chinese colleagues, the sprawling mountainside complex will become the world's premier panda research facility, with laboratories, libraries and special breeding pens to help sustain the panda population. Says Schaller: "The Chinese will probably save the panda. They are determined to do it. But it has to be a long-term effort. You can never let go." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.