I wonder what happen when both parents are Chinese leased pandas. Implications?

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Like other endangered species coming from China, the pandas obviously come with strings attached. The hosting institution pays millions each year to lease the animals, and of course, by contract, any offsprings that come from the leased pair also should belong to China.

Look at the Toki(Crested Ibis) on Sado Island. Every other chick being born from the original pair that was given to the Emperor by the Chinese Government, belongs to China. And Japan has contractual obligations to take good care of the birds, make huge medical investments to assure their health, and to send them “back” to China with costs being paid by Japanese taxpayers. Chinese government officials coming to Sado to observe the birds are of course all covered by Japan in terms of airfare and accomodations.

The Toki business with Japan went so well, that now China is giving a pair of these birds to Korea this week. The Latin name for the Toki is Nipponia Nippon. I just hope that the Koreans will not torture and tear these birds apart in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul each time the Takeshima issue comes up.

The endangered animal business is one good example of what the communist Chinese learned from the capitalist world. Outside of China, this is called “licensing business.” American businesses like Disney came up with the original idea. Good job, China!

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Cute though they are, I am always reminded of a conversation I had over a few beers with a zoologist some years ago: Mankind’s efforts to “save the panda” are probably just postponing a historical inevitability. The panda is an animal that, while omnivorous by design, is so attached to hard-to-digest bamboo that it eats it almost to the exclusion of a lot of other sources of food in its environment. If the bamboo disappears, so does the panda. It could survive quite well by just switching to something else, but it won’t.

They also don’t seem to like to mate, have a very low chance of successful impregnation if they do, and if after somehow successfully mating the female does give birth, she is very likely to be a lousy mother. Infant mortality among wild pandas is apparently incredibly high for a large mammal, perhaps in part because pandas often give birth to twins but the mother will only care for one, leaving one to die or not infrequently both to die as the mother can’t decide which squealing pink mass of flesh to pay attention to. This is why in the conservation centers human intervention is as obvious as it is – without humans stepping in all the time the panda population would probably never noticeably increase.

Destruction of the wild pandas’ environment has made them endangered faster, but it probably has not made them endangered “period”. That the panda has survived as long as it has is more a testament to the fact that there isn’t any other animal in that environment more effectively eating bamboo than it is a testament to the fact that the panda has successfully evolved to fill its niche. It is an evolutionary dead-end, the kind that fills the fossil record.

But it is a cute little failure….

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