Just wanted to let everyone know that the BiFengXia panda base and our intern Stephanie were both unhurt in the earthquake in Lushan, China (very close to Ya’An). Here’s Stephanie’s blog reporting the entire experience:
Steph writes,
“Yesterday morning started out pretty normal as I got on the bus for the panda base Continue reading
As Nate mentioned earlier, Stephanie (our new intern) arrived just in the nick of time for breeding season to go into full swing. It’s as if the pandas new she’d be completely overwhelmed if they all went into estrous the first couple of days she arrived. We had four pandas go into estrous over the last four days and the weather decided to throw us some curve balls to boot!
Day 1: Stephanie arrived on the base to start scoring Su Lin and Yuan Yuan for pre-mating behaviors. Su Lin is a San Diego panda and this was her first year going into estrous.
Stephanie McMahon scoring the pre-mating behaviors of Su Lin and Yuan Yuan. Notice how she’s still smiling!
As Nate alluded to, we’re crazy busy at the panda base (breeding video to come soon!) but I wanted to write a quick post about how our project was featured on mircroryza.com and zooborns.com today.
Thanks to the Xinbin lab of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for analyzing our samples in record time. The results of the analysis completely surprised us. Every sample was nearly ten times lower than the World Health Organizations recommended limit.
This great news sparked us to take a further look as to why the levels are so low. At first glance, as was previously thought, the pandas are eating bamboo covered in deposited soot from a smog covered sky. You can rub your fingers over the bamboo and they come off black. What we discovered next explained the pandas clean bill of health.
I will reveal their secret in a future post as we get closer to writing up the results.