Wang Jia and her hard earned treat
Research on pandas and in a foreign country doesn’t come without it’s challenges. To see how true this is just keep reading to hear how Jasmine’s independent project has hit a couple of road blocks!
I was really lucky to receive funding from my school to come to Bifengxia and work as an intern for PDXWildlife for the summer. One of the additional requirements of my award is the completion of an independent project that had to be proposed before beginning my internship. After checking with Meg and doing some research, I settled on extending a study on giant panda spatial memory by doing the data collection outside of the breeding season and doing analyses by additional variables like born in captivity versus wild caught and individual enclosure size.
Now, a month and a half, two carpenters, and numerous meetings with Bifengxia directors later, I have finally started collecting my data!
The first of many challenges of getting my project up and running was commissioning the apparatuses. I was planning to simply replicate the ones from the previous study, but when I arrived and saw the enclosures I would be working with, I realized that it would be impossible to do observations outside for all the bears. I had to improvise a way to affix the boxes to the ground or the wall and eventually (after letting go of an impractical suction cup idea) settled on using zip ties to strap them to the bars of their indoor enclosures. This alone took me to one carpenter after another, finally getting a sturdy wooden box approved.
Unfortunately, when brainstorming with Miranda, Lauran, and various keepers, somehow we overlooked the fact that a food-motivated bear could easily tear those from the bars.
Jin Ke and his new favorite toys – my torn up prototype boxes
Another, less complicated challenge has been simply figuring out the sample I would be able to work with. Finding out which bears were where, and whether or not we could access them was more difficult than we anticipated. Luckily, the keepers have been more than willing to communicate once they understand what we’re asking. I won’t be able to observe the number of bears that I had originally aimed for, but still enough to do some simple analyses with the data!
So far, the bears I’ve been working with are all over the place in terms of performance. My champion is Yi Bao, who has the leading record of accessing all 8 bowls as soon as three minutes into the sesson. On the other end of the spectrum is Yao Man, who will retrieve two apple slices, and then paced for the remaining time in the session.
Gong Zhu’s determined attempt to find the apple slice
In addition to the raw retrieval times and success, I’ve also noticed a wide variety of feeder contact topographies. Yi Bao is the most efficient, planting both front paws on either side of the bowl and using one to push against it, flipping it over. This is contrasted by Gong Zhu’s wildly inefficient tactic of biting the tops of the bowls to pick them up. She has left me with 5 mangled bowls, but she seems like she’s improving her technique these last 2 days.
I’m roughly one third of the way through my first set of bears, and hopefully all goes well for the rest of my time here. Wish me luck!!!
-Jasmine
