Infrared cameras capture panda’s attempt to improve his love life
Print Edition
A nature reserve in northwest China’s Gansu Province has captured its first film footage of some striking courtship behavior by a male panda — urinating while doing a handstand.
In the clip shown to reporters yesterday, the giant panda pushes his left hind leg up against a tree and starts to urinate on the bark in a half upside-down position. He then gets down, walks to another tree some 10 meters away, smells it for a moment and repeats the action.
The video was taken on January 15 at the Baishuijiang National Nature Reserve using infrared cameras which have been recording behavior among the reclusive inhabitants of the forest for the past three years.
Reserve staff said urinating in a handstand position is a common courtship act by giant pandas. The urine contains pheromones and the scent can spread further, attracting more potential partners, if the urine is higher up a tree.
At the same time, pandas also use their urine to mark territory and warn members of the same sex to stay away, increasing their chances of mating.
The Baishuijiang reserve is one of China’s largest habitats for wild pandas. There are 132 pandas in the province, 110 of them in Baishuijiang.
Meanwhile, Ya’an City saw its wild panda population grow from 259 to 340 in the 10 years to the end of 2013, local authorities said yesterday.
The size of the panda habitats in Ya’an in southwest China’s Sichuan Province increased to 548,000 hectares during the period.
The data was obtained by a survey conducted by Ya’an from the start of 2011 to the end of 2013, as part of China’s fourth decennial panda census.
The panda population grew despite the fact that Ya’an’s Lushan County was hit by a deadly 7.0-magnitude earthquake in April 2013.
The quake and mudslides triggered by it damaged about 16,600 hectares of panda habitat, according to officials with the local forestry bureau. Reconstruction of the habitat had been carried out smoothly over the past two years, they said.
Local residents now see wild pandas more frequently than they did before the quake, they added.
As of the end of 2013, there were 1,864 giant pandas living in the wild in China, an increase of 268 over the population in 2003, according to the State Forestry Administration.
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