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!
Directly after this photo was taken, we jumped it up a notch and recorded Gong Zhu and Wu Gang’s three breeding attempts and a final fourth successful mating! In the afternoon Su Lin and Yuan Yuan were introduced for mating and were successful – yay San Diego pandas! Thoroughly tired we headed home to eat some good Chinese food and try to get some sleep.
Stephanie and Yi Bao
Day 2: The next day we scored Cui Cui and Hua Mei who were on the cusp of going into estrous. Since we were having such an “easy” morning, the weather decided it should make things hard on us and start raining as soon as we got there (of course it wasn’t raining in Ya’An so neither of us had our rain gear). Note to self: always come prepared for ANYTHING in biology. Luckily, we had some umbrellas in the office so we crouched (rather uncomfortably) under them in an attempt to keep our recording papers dry. Oh how I was wishing for the observer palm pilot programs at this point!
Our makeshift viewing hut. Note: no smile here!
As you can tell Stephanie’s a trooper and she’s been picking up the scoring like a pro! Today our inter-observer reliability tests gave us an 88% – that means we passed! And we still have four more days to improve that.
I’ll catch you up on the mating pictures of the San Diego pandas in the next post! Mei Sheng, Su Lin, and Hua Mei will all have had opportunities by then!
-Meg
