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Pandamonium Tech partners with Zoo Atlanta to help preserve pandas. By Amanda Hainsworth |
The long-awaited arrival last fall of the two giant pandas at Zoo Atlanta ensures the continuation of unique research that aims to help save this very rare endangered animal. The Georgia Institute of Technology, in partnership with Zoo Atlanta, is taking a behavioral research approach on how to improve the success rate of captive panda breeding.
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Rebecca Snyder, a doctoral student from the Georgia Tech College of Sciences, has been researching the behavioral development of pandas at southwestern China's Chengdu Zoo and Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding for the past two and a half years. Snyder believes the tendency of Chinese researchers to remove panda cubs from their mothers before six months of age cuts off the cubs from important maternal interaction and guidance.
"In Chinese zoos, the cubs have usually been weaned by six months of age so that the mother can become pregnant and produce another cub as soon as possible," she says. "In the wild, cubs stay with their mothers for 18 months, sometimes longer."
Snyder sees this mother-cub relationship as the key to the panda cub's behavioral development and, ultimately, to the likelihood of it breeding successfully.
"The mother-cub relationship is the most important one a panda will have," Synder says. "Possibly because captive pandas are separated so early from their mothers, they don't have the opportunity to learn important social behaviors.
"Even though pandas are solitary as adults, they still need to know how to react to other pandas if they are to mate and then, if female, how to look after a cub," she adds.
Lun Lun and Yang Yang, the two cubs that arrived at Zoo Atlanta, have been the subject of Snyder's watchful eye since their birth at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Yang Yang stayed with his mother for 13 months, while Lun Lun stayed with hers for four and a half months. They were born within three weeks of each other and are now more than two and a half years old.
At Zoo Atlanta, Snyder continues to study their behavioral differences and development in the Georgia Tech Laboratory for Animal Behavior Research. She is also investigating their transition to puberty and adulthood, along with their reproductive behavior.
Chengdu researchers are uncertain how closely related Lun Lun and Yang Yang are, and because of that, it is uncertain whether they will breed, Synder explains.
Snyder's research is being overseen by Dr. Terry L. Maple, director of Zoo Atlanta, and professor of psychology and the Elizabeth Smithgall-Watts Chair of Behavior and Conservation at Georgia Tech.
For more information, see www.zooatlanta.org.
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