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Panda, Inc.
JULY 2006
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By Lynne Warren
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Photographs by Michael Nichols (above), and Fritz Hoffmann
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What's black and white and adored all over—and can cost a zoo more than three million dollars a year?
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He's got chubby cheeks. He naps a lot. He eats with his hands. He lives with his mother. Not exactly the kind of character you'd expect to find at the center of high finance, international diplomacy, fan frenzy, government scrutiny, and scientific fascination. But Tai Shan is a giant panda cub, and that makes him, well, not your average bear.
Born at 3:41 a.m. on Saturday, July 9, 2005, at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., Tai Shan is the first offspring of Tian Tian and Mei Xiang, male and female giant pandas shipped from China to Washington in December 2000. There are only eight other pandas in the United States: two at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia, two at the Memphis Zoo in Tennessee, and four at southern California's San Diego Zoo, where Bai Yun has had three healthy cubs in the past seven years. Together these 11 animals represent an extraordinary investment of scientific resources—and cash.
Hosting giant pandas costs each zoo an average of 2.6 million dollars a year, and that's if no babies arrive. Add a cub, and the budget tops three million dollars. Add two cubs (nearly half of panda pregnancies produce twins), and the tab approaches four million dollars. "Nobody," says David Wildt, head of the National Zoo's reproductive sciences program, "would ever commit this kind of money to any other species."
What makes pandas so special? Could be sheer cuteness. Giant pandas possess the charisma that politicians and movie stars dream of—and people crave a glimpse. The National Zoo's Internet panda cams, which follow the daily activities of Tai Shan and his mom, draw an average of two million online visits a month. In the first three months that Tai Shan was on public display, visits to the zoo jumped by as much as 50 percent over prior years. Adoring fans pack the railing at the Giant Panda Habitat shoulder to shoulder. Fingers point, voices coo, faces crease in blissful grins. So many cameras click at once that you'd think you were on the red carpet on Oscar night.
Scarcity also boosts the bears' cachet. Giant pandas are excruciatingly rare. Even other famously endangered mammals—tigers, gorillas, black rhinos, Asian elephants—outnumber them, both in the wild and in captivity. China's most recent national giant panda survey reported that 1,590 of the black-and-white bears survive in the rugged hills of Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu Provinces. Such a precise figure is questionable, especially for a hard-to-spot species that occupies isolated and often virtually impassable mountain forests. Wildlife biologists put the free-ranging population somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 individuals. In captivity, there were only 188 pandas worldwide at the end of 2005: the 11 U.S. residents, a handful of others in Mexico, Japan, Thailand, Germany, and Austria, and all the rest in zoos and research centers in their native China.
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