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We pulled pandas back from the brink of extinction. Meanwhile, the rest of nature collapsed.

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Wednesday, January 25, 2023

The trouble with the conservation’s cutest mascot. On a chilly spring day in 1966, zookeepers in London loaded a giant panda named Chi-Chi onto a commercial plane. The aircraft was bound for Russia. Chi-Chi was bound, you might say, for love. She would soon arrive at the Moscow Zoo to meet a slightly younger male named An-An, the only other captive giant panda living outside of China at the time. The goal was to get the two bears to breed. To prepare for Chi-Chi’s departure, British European Airways removed about 30 seats in the front of the plane. The panda was carried aboard in a crate and separated from 37 passengers by a screen. Flight attendants sprayed deodorant to try and vanquish the scent of the 235-pound bear. For lunch, the attendants served passengers a side of bamboo hearts in Chi-Chi’s honor. Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images Chi-Chi leaves London for Moscow on March 11, 1966. The media breathlessly covered the long-distance love affair. Yet it was doomed from the start. When the bears first met in Moscow, An-An attacked Chi-Chi and zookeepers had to separate them with brooms, one newspaper reported. The pandas stayed in separate cages that summer. In the fall, keepers arranged another meeting, but this time, Chi-Chi “slapped” An-An in the face. Soon after, Chi-Chi returned to London, prompting headlines like “From Russia ... Without Love.” Although attempts to breed Chi-Chi and An-An failed, they marked the start of a massive, global campaign to breed pandas in captivity. It was fueled by a sense of urgency: The giant panda population was dwindling. In southwestern China, the only place on Earth where the animals live, human development was destroying forests, and pandas were being plucked from their land and placed in zoos. In the 1980s, only about 1,100 bears remained, down from a historical population that scientists believe once numbered in the tens of thousands. As pandas started vanishing from the wild, they grew into powerful symbols of the movement to conserve the natural world. As the plight of wildlife was making headlines, pandas — clumsy, big-eyed bears that look like plush toys come to life — emerged as the perfect mascot to rally support. The World Wildlife Fund, an influential environmental organization, helped formalize the animals as icons when it chose the panda as its logo in 1961. Chi-Chi, An-An’s wouldn’t-be mate, was the inspiration for the design. (WWF, now known internationally as the World Wide Fund for Nature, chose the panda, in part, because black-and-white logos were cheaper to print.) As pandas shot to stardom, China, the US, and zoos around the world fueled the captive breeding campaign with tens of millions of dollars in veterinary research. China also created dozens of forest reserves to protect the bears. In 2018, the country announced plans to combine many of them into a single habitat three times larger than Yellowstone National Park. VCG via Getty Images Giant panda cubs rest in a tree at the Shenshuping Panda Base in the Wolong Nature Reserve in China in April 2022. These efforts have unquestionably paid off for pandas. Scientists learned from Chi-Chi and An-An’s platonic exchange and, in time, they nearly perfected the difficult art of panda breeding and husbandry. That’s the only reason you can see them in zoos today. The bears are also recovering in the wild. The most recent estimates indicate that more than 1,800 pandas now live in southwestern China, and their numbers are increasing. That trend prompted the country to announce, in 2021, that pandas are no longer endangered. (The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the global authority on endangered animals, delisted pandas in 2016.) Imagine that: The panda, the very symbol of endangered species, is no longer endangered. But if giant pandas are mascots for endangered species, then their team is, so to speak, losing. In the time that environmental advocates were saving pandas, much of the rest of the planet’s wildlife continued to deteriorate. The world now faces an unprecedented and accelerating crisis of biodiversity loss, with more than 1 million species at risk of extinction. Forests are quieter. The oceans are emptier. The story of the panda is, in a sense, a story of success. Tales of rebounding animal populations are rare. But it carries with it a warning: The model of conservation that lifted up pandas won’t work to save everything else. The global effort to save giant pandas is rooted in our collective obsession with these bears. It dates back to at least the 1930s, when a New York City socialite journeyed East. The only pandas on American soil back then were stuffed bears in natural history museums. But in 1936, a dress designer in NYC named Ruth Harkness traveled to China in search of a live cub. She was trying to finish what her late husband, William Harkness Jr., had started: Months earlier, the young explorer died from cancer on an expedition to capture a panda and bring it back to the US. One November morning, Mrs. Harkness and her local guide heard squealing by the stump of a large spruce tree in the mountains outside of Chengdu, Henry Nicholls recounts in The Way of the Panda. There, she found a baby panda no larger than a kitten. The cub was perhaps less than two weeks old. “I stood for minutes in a trance,” Harkness, known for her deep voice and bright red lipstick, told a reporter in 1937. “I had discovered a most precious thing — a tiny offspring of one of Mother Nature’s greatest and rarest mysteries in the animal kingdom.” She named the cub Su-Lin and took him back to New York City on a steamship. He was an instant hit. “Wherever she goes, Mrs. Harkness lugs her 10-pound jewel along in a traveling basket,” the Daily News wrote at the time. “The infant panda has viewed the interior of some of New York’s best restaurants since its arrival.” Bettmann Archive Ruth Harkness holds Su-Lin in her room at the Hotel Biltmore in New York City in 1936, shortly after returning from China. What makes animals like the panda so popular? Maybe it’s their looks, their striking appearance, cute and fearsome all at once. Pandas also exploit our parenting instincts. Cubs have round faces with big cheeks, and they tumble about like helpless toddlers. (We also tend to like what we can relate to. Fellow mammals with arms? Sure. Freshwater mussels? Not so much.) Harkness eventually brought Su-Lin to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, where the cub — the first live panda in the US — drew a record 53,000 visitors on the first day he was displayed. It was China, however, that turned the bears into a global sensation. In the 1970s, the Chinese government began sending wild-caught pandas around the world as state gifts — a sign of goodwill and friendship, historian Elena Songster wrote in her 2018 book, Panda Nation. There was even a term for it: Panda diplomacy. “Giant pandas served the Chinese government as invaluable tools for putting a friendly face on China,” Songster wrote. “These fuzzy creatures thawed Cold War tensions and promoted the idea that warmer relations with the inscrutable Communist power could be possible.” Most famously, China gave two pandas to President Richard Nixon in 1972 after a series of successful peace talks. The bears, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, flew to DC on Air Force One and were taken to the National Zoo “under security measures as tight as if they had been Chairman Mao,” the New York Times reported. (In exchange, the US sent China Matilda and Milton, a pair of musk oxen with some kind of skin condition.) American pandas were as famous as any celebrity. Two decades after Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling arrived, China sent the US two more bears, Shi Shi and Bai Yun, this time to the San Diego Zoo. News helicopters filmed their high-security motorcade as if they were heads of state. “Make no mistake: That phenomenon that zookeepers call ‘pandamania’ is back,” the LA Times wrote in 1996. “No animal in the history of US zoos brings the crowds and the awe-struck response of pandas.” Irving Haberman/IH Images/Getty Images Photographers get close-up photographs of a giant panda eating bamboo shoots and leaves at the Bronx Zoo in New York circa 1947. Pandamania was good for zoos and for China. It wasn’t necessarily good for wild pandas. In the 1980s, China stopped giving away pandas as state gifts but began loaning them out for a few months at a time, often at the expense of the wild population. George Schaller, then director of science at a large environmental organization called the Wildlife Conservation Society, criticized these short-term loans as “rent-a-panda” programs. “I have a nightmare vision of evermore pandas being drained from the wild until the species exists only in captivity,” he wrote in his 1993 book The Last Panda. In those years, pandas were facing other pressures in their homeland. Mines and human developments in Sichuan Province were replacing forests. Meanwhile, pandas were running out of food — stirring up fears that the world’s most beloved animal might soon go extinct. Pandas, like humans, are technically omnivores. About 6,000 years ago, however, they stopped consuming meat, for the most part. Today, pandas almost exclusively eat bamboo. While bamboo grows abundantly in China, it has a few critical shortcomings. Like celery, it doesn’t have many calories, so pandas have to spend half of the day eating. Plus, they can’t put on enough fat to hibernate in the winter like other bears. Bamboo is also a somewhat unreliable food source. Every so often, at seemingly random intervals, entire hillsides of bamboo stalks flower, produce seeds, and die. Normally, only one or a few bamboo species might flower at the same time, so pandas can just forage for other varieties if they need to. But in the ’70s, multiple species died all at once, according to Songster, causing the bears to starve. By some estimates, more than 100 died. Then in the ‘80s, bamboo forests flowered and died once again, fueling concerns that pandas were at risk of extinction (not to mention reports that pandas were looting food from peoples’ homes). Although it’s not clear whether the second bamboo die-off actually harmed many pandas, it helped ignite the global campaign to save these animals — at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. China and groups such as WWF relied on two main approaches. One was to establish a system of protected areas that prohibited hunting, logging, and other harmful human activities, as China has done. Another was to build out a massive breeding operation, the likes of which the world had never seen. Kin Cheung/AP One-month-old panda triplets rest as they receive a body check at the Chimelong Safari Park in Guangzhou, China, in August 2014. He Haiyang/Sichuan Daily/VCG via Getty Images A giant panda cub is seen at the Shenshuping Panda Base in the Wolong Nature Reserve in China in July 2021. Liu Jin/AFP via Getty Images Breeders play with panda cubs at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda in Wolong, China, in February 2007. Breeding animals in captivity can theoretically help refresh a dwindling wild animal population. It also helps restock zoos. Without breeding pandas or taking them from the wild, zoos would eventually run out of their biggest attractions. That’s a problem, not only for zoos but for conservation, said William McShea, a scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. “If you’re going to sell people on giant pandas, you need to show people a giant panda,” he said. (Pandas are “great showmen,” McShea added. “Giant pandas will sit there and essentially do tricks for you all day long.”) Breeding pandas, however, is a challenge. Female pandas ovulate just once a year for one to three days. In the wild, males will congregate along ridge tops in the spring and “a stream of visiting females in heat keeps the mating activity intense,” McShea has written. In captivity, however, vets have to introduce a pair of pandas at just the right time. Even then, the bears may prefer to swat at each other rather than have sex. “There was nothing easy about any of it,” said David Kersey, an associate professor of physiology at Western University who helped develop the National Zoo’s captive breeding program. In several instances, zoos have tried using videos of pandas copulating, a.k.a. panda porn, to get the bears in the mood. This is not a joke. At one of the most famous breeding facilities in China, scientists showed a video of pandas mating to a five-year-old female bear named Ke Lin because she kept rejecting her mate, Yongyong. “We played them the film and she took great interest in it,” a spokesman at the Chengdu facility told the Independent. “After that, there was no stopping her and they mated successfully.” Zookeepers have also tried giving pandas viagra and working them out. In 2011, keepers at the National Zoo ran Tian Tian, a popular male panda, through a sort of sex training program designed to strengthen his legs. “We’re building up his stamina,” Brandie Smith, a senior curator at the zoo, told the Washington Post. “I think Tian is in pretty good shape, but ... we’re turning him into an Olympic athlete.” The early years of panda breeding were full of disasters. In one case, a male panda in Japan reportedly died during a routine electro-ejaculation procedure — which involves a veterinarian sending a small shock to the animal’s prostate to get him to produce semen. Zookeepers also had a hard time figuring out if a bear was pregnant until right before she gave birth. Infants are tiny, weighing just 3 to 5 ounces. During ultrasounds, zookeepers would occasionally confuse feces for a fetus. It was a mess. Yet little by little, the science improved. Vets figured out how to tell exactly when a female is ovulating and in heat. They also learned which males make the perfect genetic match. “We’ve seen the success rate of breeding just skyrocket,” Kersey said. Scientists also learned how to keep more babies alive. In the ’90s, the survival rate of captive cubs in China was about 10 percent, according to Qiongyu Huang, a wildlife biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. Today, it’s almost 90 percent, he said. There are now around 600 pandas in captivity. “Veterinary science has done an outstanding job,” said Marc Brody, president of the NGO Panda Mountain, who’s worked on panda conservation for more than two decades. Pandas are a threatened species, still just one step away from the classification of endangered. But along with China’s growing efforts to protect a massive area of forested land, captive breeding has, for now, managed to avert their extinction. “The turnaround in China has just been remarkable,” McShea said. Pandas are one of several iconic creatures that have for decades drawn the bulk of conservation support and public attention. Tigers, mountain gorillas, wolves, and elephants are other examples. Pouring resources into a handful of popular animals was the dominant approach to conservation in the late 20th century, said Jason Gilchrist, an ecologist at Edinburgh Napier University. The idea was to use those flashy species to draw in funding that could trickle down to other animals — in other words, pandas could be tools for conservation, not just diplomacy. Plus, protecting land for one kind of animal can shield a whole host of others. This approach, known as single-species conservation, has worked to some degree, especially for nature’s A-listers. Since 2008, for example, India has doubled its wild population of tigers. The number of mountain gorillas in Central Africa is up, too, as is the US population of gray wolves and bald eagles. Recent research also shows that past conservation efforts have, at least temporarily, helped prevent a number of bird and mammal species from going extinct. Still, it’s hard to see this species-focused model as a success, some scientists say, if the ultimate goal of conservation is to protect biodiversity and the countless benefits it provides. On this endeavor, the world has failed. Praveeni Chamathka for Vox Since 1970, as the campaign to save pandas was ramping up, populations of most major animal groups including birds, mammals, and fish have declined by an average of 69 percent. Species without popular appeal are often worse off. One-fifth of reptiles such as crocodiles and turtles are now threatened with extinction. Mussels are in peril, as are corals — two animals that provide essential services for us and other creatures. (The latter, for example, provide shelter for fish and safeguard coastal communities from flooding. Popularity isn’t always a sign of ecological importance.) Furthermore, parks designed to protect charismatic species don’t always safeguard other animals. A 2020 study in the journal Nature, for example, found that four species of large carnivores (the leopard, snow leopard, wolf, and an Asian dog called a dhole) have declined across panda habitat since the mid-20th century. Another study, published in 2021, found that populations of several species that overlap with giant pandas, including the Asiatic black bear, Chinese serow, and forest musk deer, have all plummeted, as well. (Panda preserves may have slowed these species’ declines.) “Panda conservation doesn’t appear to be benefiting other species, or the wider ecosystem,” Gilchrist wrote about the 2020 study. “These findings shake the foundations of one of conservation’s most enduring ideas — that investing time and money into protecting particular large, influential species can pay dividends for the other species and habitats they coexist with.” Put another way, “you’re essentially sleepwalking into losing biodiversity by focusing resources on specific species,” Gilchrist told Vox. Breeding animals in captivity — now a widespread practice among zoos — also has questionable benefits for wild populations, according to some researchers. “Captive breeding is not a conservation strategy,” said Jillian Ryan, a researcher who wrote her dissertation at the University of South Australia on panda conservation. Xinhua/Xue Yubin via Getty Images Giant panda Hua Yan, from the China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas, is released into the wild at Liziping Nature Reserve in Ya’an, China, in October 2016. Zoos “carefully breed their animals as if they might be called upon at any moment to release them, like Noah throwing open the doors to the ark,” Emma Marris wrote in the 2021 book Wild Souls: Freedom and flourishing in the non-human world. “But that day of release never quite seems to come.” Zoos rarely reintroduce animals to the wild because they don’t often survive, Ryan said. A dozen or so captive pandas have been released in China so far, and at least a few of them have died. The first panda scientists ever released, named Xiang Xiang (or “Lucky”), died in 2007, less than a year after his return to the wild. He likely fell out of a tree following a fight with wild-born pandas, according to multiple news reports. “Any reintroduction program has an inherent challenge: You’re increasing the potential for the animal to die,” said Jake Owens, director of conservation at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens. “The nice thing about zoos is that they do provide really high care.” Owens and some other researchers argue that captive breeding can be an essential tool to avert extinction. It’s helped species like the endangered California condor recover, he says. Zoos and breeding facilities also help people fall in love with pandas, he said, which has put pressure on China to conserve their habitat. But using zoo animals as inspiration for conservation has its limits, Marris argues. “There’s no unambiguous evidence that zoos are making visitors care more about conservation or take any action to support it,” she writes. People go to the zoo, she added, to be entertained. Some scholars also argue that campaigns to save charismatic animals have distorted the human relationship with nature. Pandas, and most other highly charismatic species, are only visible in zoos or protected areas far from cities, reinforcing the idea that nature is something to look at, something apart from ourselves. Yet we all exist within ecosystems and depend on the services they provide, from water purification to crop pollination. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images Visitors take photographs of giant panda cub Xiang Xiang at Ueno Zoological Gardens in Tokyo, Japan, in February 2018. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images Seven-month-old panda cub Xiang Xiang rests on a tree stump as adoring fans photograph her. Indeed, most of the world’s remaining biodiversity exists alongside humanity — all 8 billion of us. To conserve wildlife, people will need to steward the plants and animals in their own backyards, in cities, in places they consider their home, said David Jachowski, a professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University. The environmental movement is changing. In recent decades, large environmental groups have adopted a more ecosystem-scale approach to their work. In a previous interview with Vox, Marco Lambertini, then the head of WWF International, said that using pandas and tigers to inspire the public to care about wildlife was incredibly effective. That approach helped WWF grow into the world’s largest environmental organization. But he acknowledged that the nonprofit could have done a better job at “connecting the dots,” linking wildlife to ecosystems and all the benefits they provide for people. (WWF told Vox that ecosystem-based approaches have always been core to the organization’s strategy.) Perhaps, then, it doesn’t make sense to have a single species as the mascot for conservation. If there were one animal to represent the movement to conserve the natural world, the panda is probably the wrong one. It could be the weasel, Jachowski says; they’re predators that help sustain the food chain. Other researchers have argued that even earthworms would be better candidates. Worms and weasels might not have the appeal of pandas. But they’re linchpins in a complex web of life that’s unraveling before our eyes. To sustain these and so many other underrated animals — the moths and flies, the bats and shrews — is to sustain the world’s ecosystems. It is to sustain ourselves. Benji Jones is a senior environmental reporter at Vox, covering biodiversity loss and climate change. Before joining Vox, he was a senior energy reporter at Insider. Benji previously worked as a wildlife researcher.

The trouble with the conservation’s cutest mascot.

On a chilly spring day in 1966, zookeepers in London loaded a giant panda named Chi-Chi onto a commercial plane. The aircraft was bound for Russia. Chi-Chi was bound, you might say, for love. She would soon arrive at the Moscow Zoo to meet a slightly younger male named An-An, the only other captive giant panda living outside of China at the time. The goal was to get the two bears to breed.

To prepare for Chi-Chi’s departure, British European Airways removed about 30 seats in the front of the plane. The panda was carried aboard in a crate and separated from 37 passengers by a screen. Flight attendants sprayed deodorant to try and vanquish the scent of the 235-pound bear. For lunch, the attendants served passengers a side of bamboo hearts in Chi-Chi’s honor.

A black-and-white photo of a panda in a cage in an airplane. Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images
Chi-Chi leaves London for Moscow on March 11, 1966.

The media breathlessly covered the long-distance love affair. Yet it was doomed from the start. When the bears first met in Moscow, An-An attacked Chi-Chi and zookeepers had to separate them with brooms, one newspaper reported. The pandas stayed in separate cages that summer. In the fall, keepers arranged another meeting, but this time, Chi-Chi “slapped” An-An in the face. Soon after, Chi-Chi returned to London, prompting headlines like “From Russia ... Without Love.”

Although attempts to breed Chi-Chi and An-An failed, they marked the start of a massive, global campaign to breed pandas in captivity. It was fueled by a sense of urgency: The giant panda population was dwindling. In southwestern China, the only place on Earth where the animals live, human development was destroying forests, and pandas were being plucked from their land and placed in zoos. In the 1980s, only about 1,100 bears remained, down from a historical population that scientists believe once numbered in the tens of thousands.

As pandas started vanishing from the wild, they grew into powerful symbols of the movement to conserve the natural world. As the plight of wildlife was making headlines, pandas — clumsy, big-eyed bears that look like plush toys come to life — emerged as the perfect mascot to rally support.

The World Wildlife Fund, an influential environmental organization, helped formalize the animals as icons when it chose the panda as its logo in 1961. Chi-Chi, An-An’s wouldn’t-be mate, was the inspiration for the design. (WWF, now known internationally as the World Wide Fund for Nature, chose the panda, in part, because black-and-white logos were cheaper to print.)

As pandas shot to stardom, China, the US, and zoos around the world fueled the captive breeding campaign with tens of millions of dollars in veterinary research. China also created dozens of forest reserves to protect the bears. In 2018, the country announced plans to combine many of them into a single habitat three times larger than Yellowstone National Park.

 VCG via Getty Images
Giant panda cubs rest in a tree at the Shenshuping Panda Base in the Wolong Nature Reserve in China in April 2022.

These efforts have unquestionably paid off for pandas. Scientists learned from Chi-Chi and An-An’s platonic exchange and, in time, they nearly perfected the difficult art of panda breeding and husbandry. That’s the only reason you can see them in zoos today.

The bears are also recovering in the wild. The most recent estimates indicate that more than 1,800 pandas now live in southwestern China, and their numbers are increasing. That trend prompted the country to announce, in 2021, that pandas are no longer endangered. (The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the global authority on endangered animals, delisted pandas in 2016.)

Imagine that: The panda, the very symbol of endangered species, is no longer endangered.

But if giant pandas are mascots for endangered species, then their team is, so to speak, losing. In the time that environmental advocates were saving pandas, much of the rest of the planet’s wildlife continued to deteriorate. The world now faces an unprecedented and accelerating crisis of biodiversity loss, with more than 1 million species at risk of extinction. Forests are quieter. The oceans are emptier.

The story of the panda is, in a sense, a story of success. Tales of rebounding animal populations are rare. But it carries with it a warning: The model of conservation that lifted up pandas won’t work to save everything else.


The global effort to save giant pandas is rooted in our collective obsession with these bears. It dates back to at least the 1930s, when a New York City socialite journeyed East.

The only pandas on American soil back then were stuffed bears in natural history museums. But in 1936, a dress designer in NYC named Ruth Harkness traveled to China in search of a live cub. She was trying to finish what her late husband, William Harkness Jr., had started: Months earlier, the young explorer died from cancer on an expedition to capture a panda and bring it back to the US.

One November morning, Mrs. Harkness and her local guide heard squealing by the stump of a large spruce tree in the mountains outside of Chengdu, Henry Nicholls recounts in The Way of the Panda. There, she found a baby panda no larger than a kitten. The cub was perhaps less than two weeks old.

“I stood for minutes in a trance,” Harkness, known for her deep voice and bright red lipstick, told a reporter in 1937. “I had discovered a most precious thing — a tiny offspring of one of Mother Nature’s greatest and rarest mysteries in the animal kingdom.”

She named the cub Su-Lin and took him back to New York City on a steamship. He was an instant hit. “Wherever she goes, Mrs. Harkness lugs her 10-pound jewel along in a traveling basket,” the Daily News wrote at the time. “The infant panda has viewed the interior of some of New York’s best restaurants since its arrival.”

A black-and-white photo of a woman holding a very cute baby panda, roughly the size of a large human infant. Bettmann Archive
Ruth Harkness holds Su-Lin in her room at the Hotel Biltmore in New York City in 1936, shortly after returning from China.

What makes animals like the panda so popular? Maybe it’s their looks, their striking appearance, cute and fearsome all at once. Pandas also exploit our parenting instincts. Cubs have round faces with big cheeks, and they tumble about like helpless toddlers. (We also tend to like what we can relate to. Fellow mammals with arms? Sure. Freshwater mussels? Not so much.)

Harkness eventually brought Su-Lin to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, where the cub — the first live panda in the US — drew a record 53,000 visitors on the first day he was displayed.

It was China, however, that turned the bears into a global sensation.

In the 1970s, the Chinese government began sending wild-caught pandas around the world as state gifts — a sign of goodwill and friendship, historian Elena Songster wrote in her 2018 book, Panda Nation. There was even a term for it: Panda diplomacy.

“Giant pandas served the Chinese government as invaluable tools for putting a friendly face on China,” Songster wrote. “These fuzzy creatures thawed Cold War tensions and promoted the idea that warmer relations with the inscrutable Communist power could be possible.”

Most famously, China gave two pandas to President Richard Nixon in 1972 after a series of successful peace talks. The bears, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, flew to DC on Air Force One and were taken to the National Zoo “under security measures as tight as if they had been Chairman Mao,” the New York Times reported. (In exchange, the US sent China Matilda and Milton, a pair of musk oxen with some kind of skin condition.)

American pandas were as famous as any celebrity. Two decades after Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling arrived, China sent the US two more bears, Shi Shi and Bai Yun, this time to the San Diego Zoo. News helicopters filmed their high-security motorcade as if they were heads of state.

“Make no mistake: That phenomenon that zookeepers call ‘pandamania’ is back,” the LA Times wrote in 1996. “No animal in the history of US zoos brings the crowds and the awe-struck response of pandas.”

A black-and-white photo of several photographers with bulky cameras taking photos of a small panda cub. One of the photographers is crouching, getting a shot at ground level. Irving Haberman/IH Images/Getty Images
Photographers get close-up photographs of a giant panda eating bamboo shoots and leaves at the Bronx Zoo in New York circa 1947.

Pandamania was good for zoos and for China. It wasn’t necessarily good for wild pandas.

In the 1980s, China stopped giving away pandas as state gifts but began loaning them out for a few months at a time, often at the expense of the wild population. George Schaller, then director of science at a large environmental organization called the Wildlife Conservation Society, criticized these short-term loans as “rent-a-panda” programs.

“I have a nightmare vision of evermore pandas being drained from the wild until the species exists only in captivity,” he wrote in his 1993 book The Last Panda.

In those years, pandas were facing other pressures in their homeland. Mines and human developments in Sichuan Province were replacing forests. Meanwhile, pandas were running out of food — stirring up fears that the world’s most beloved animal might soon go extinct.


Pandas, like humans, are technically omnivores. About 6,000 years ago, however, they stopped consuming meat, for the most part. Today, pandas almost exclusively eat bamboo.

While bamboo grows abundantly in China, it has a few critical shortcomings. Like celery, it doesn’t have many calories, so pandas have to spend half of the day eating. Plus, they can’t put on enough fat to hibernate in the winter like other bears.

A graphic illustration of a panda in a bamboo forest.

Bamboo is also a somewhat unreliable food source. Every so often, at seemingly random intervals, entire hillsides of bamboo stalks flower, produce seeds, and die.

Normally, only one or a few bamboo species might flower at the same time, so pandas can just forage for other varieties if they need to. But in the ’70s, multiple species died all at once, according to Songster, causing the bears to starve. By some estimates, more than 100 died. Then in the ‘80s, bamboo forests flowered and died once again, fueling concerns that pandas were at risk of extinction (not to mention reports that pandas were looting food from peoples’ homes).

Although it’s not clear whether the second bamboo die-off actually harmed many pandas, it helped ignite the global campaign to save these animals — at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

China and groups such as WWF relied on two main approaches. One was to establish a system of protected areas that prohibited hunting, logging, and other harmful human activities, as China has done. Another was to build out a massive breeding operation, the likes of which the world had never seen.

A photo of three tiny pandas, each roughly the size of a sweet potato, inside a clear plastic box that resembles a prenatal incubator. Kin Cheung/AP
One-month-old panda triplets rest as they receive a body check at the Chimelong Safari Park in Guangzhou, China, in August 2014.
A photo of a newborn panda cub that resembles a fetus more than a baby, with visible pink skin beneath wispy white hairs. He Haiyang/Sichuan Daily/VCG via Getty Images
A giant panda cub is seen at the Shenshuping Panda Base in the Wolong Nature Reserve in China in July 2021.
Eight small panda cubs, the size of a cocker spaniel, but rounder, play and roll on the ground with people in matching jackets. Liu Jin/AFP via Getty Images
Breeders play with panda cubs at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda in Wolong, China, in February 2007.

Breeding animals in captivity can theoretically help refresh a dwindling wild animal population. It also helps restock zoos. Without breeding pandas or taking them from the wild, zoos would eventually run out of their biggest attractions. That’s a problem, not only for zoos but for conservation, said William McShea, a scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

“If you’re going to sell people on giant pandas, you need to show people a giant panda,” he said. (Pandas are “great showmen,” McShea added. “Giant pandas will sit there and essentially do tricks for you all day long.”)

Breeding pandas, however, is a challenge.

Female pandas ovulate just once a year for one to three days. In the wild, males will congregate along ridge tops in the spring and “a stream of visiting females in heat keeps the mating activity intense,” McShea has written. In captivity, however, vets have to introduce a pair of pandas at just the right time. Even then, the bears may prefer to swat at each other rather than have sex.

“There was nothing easy about any of it,” said David Kersey, an associate professor of physiology at Western University who helped develop the National Zoo’s captive breeding program.

In several instances, zoos have tried using videos of pandas copulating, a.k.a. panda porn, to get the bears in the mood. This is not a joke. At one of the most famous breeding facilities in China, scientists showed a video of pandas mating to a five-year-old female bear named Ke Lin because she kept rejecting her mate, Yongyong.

“We played them the film and she took great interest in it,” a spokesman at the Chengdu facility told the Independent. “After that, there was no stopping her and they mated successfully.”

Zookeepers have also tried giving pandas viagra and working them out. In 2011, keepers at the National Zoo ran Tian Tian, a popular male panda, through a sort of sex training program designed to strengthen his legs. “We’re building up his stamina,” Brandie Smith, a senior curator at the zoo, told the Washington Post. “I think Tian is in pretty good shape, but ... we’re turning him into an Olympic athlete.”

The early years of panda breeding were full of disasters. In one case, a male panda in Japan reportedly died during a routine electro-ejaculation procedure — which involves a veterinarian sending a small shock to the animal’s prostate to get him to produce semen. Zookeepers also had a hard time figuring out if a bear was pregnant until right before she gave birth. Infants are tiny, weighing just 3 to 5 ounces. During ultrasounds, zookeepers would occasionally confuse feces for a fetus. It was a mess.

Yet little by little, the science improved. Vets figured out how to tell exactly when a female is ovulating and in heat. They also learned which males make the perfect genetic match. “We’ve seen the success rate of breeding just skyrocket,” Kersey said.

Scientists also learned how to keep more babies alive. In the ’90s, the survival rate of captive cubs in China was about 10 percent, according to Qiongyu Huang, a wildlife biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. Today, it’s almost 90 percent, he said. There are now around 600 pandas in captivity.

“Veterinary science has done an outstanding job,” said Marc Brody, president of the NGO Panda Mountain, who’s worked on panda conservation for more than two decades.

Pandas are a threatened species, still just one step away from the classification of endangered. But along with China’s growing efforts to protect a massive area of forested land, captive breeding has, for now, managed to avert their extinction. “The turnaround in China has just been remarkable,” McShea said.


Pandas are one of several iconic creatures that have for decades drawn the bulk of conservation support and public attention. Tigers, mountain gorillas, wolves, and elephants are other examples.

Pouring resources into a handful of popular animals was the dominant approach to conservation in the late 20th century, said Jason Gilchrist, an ecologist at Edinburgh Napier University. The idea was to use those flashy species to draw in funding that could trickle down to other animals — in other words, pandas could be tools for conservation, not just diplomacy. Plus, protecting land for one kind of animal can shield a whole host of others.

This approach, known as single-species conservation, has worked to some degree, especially for nature’s A-listers. Since 2008, for example, India has doubled its wild population of tigers. The number of mountain gorillas in Central Africa is up, too, as is the US population of gray wolves and bald eagles. Recent research also shows that past conservation efforts have, at least temporarily, helped prevent a number of bird and mammal species from going extinct.

Still, it’s hard to see this species-focused model as a success, some scientists say, if the ultimate goal of conservation is to protect biodiversity and the countless benefits it provides. On this endeavor, the world has failed.

A graphic illustration of a crocodile on a rock. Praveeni Chamathka for Vox

Since 1970, as the campaign to save pandas was ramping up, populations of most major animal groups including birds, mammals, and fish have declined by an average of 69 percent. Species without popular appeal are often worse off. One-fifth of reptiles such as crocodiles and turtles are now threatened with extinction. Mussels are in peril, as are corals — two animals that provide essential services for us and other creatures. (The latter, for example, provide shelter for fish and safeguard coastal communities from flooding. Popularity isn’t always a sign of ecological importance.)

Furthermore, parks designed to protect charismatic species don’t always safeguard other animals. A 2020 study in the journal Nature, for example, found that four species of large carnivores (the leopard, snow leopard, wolf, and an Asian dog called a dhole) have declined across panda habitat since the mid-20th century. Another study, published in 2021, found that populations of several species that overlap with giant pandas, including the Asiatic black bear, Chinese serow, and forest musk deer, have all plummeted, as well. (Panda preserves may have slowed these species’ declines.)

“Panda conservation doesn’t appear to be benefiting other species, or the wider ecosystem,” Gilchrist wrote about the 2020 study. “These findings shake the foundations of one of conservation’s most enduring ideas — that investing time and money into protecting particular large, influential species can pay dividends for the other species and habitats they coexist with.”

Put another way, “you’re essentially sleepwalking into losing biodiversity by focusing resources on specific species,” Gilchrist told Vox.

Breeding animals in captivity — now a widespread practice among zoos — also has questionable benefits for wild populations, according to some researchers. “Captive breeding is not a conservation strategy,” said Jillian Ryan, a researcher who wrote her dissertation at the University of South Australia on panda conservation.

A photo of a panda emerging from a crate while onlookers watch and take photos. Xinhua/Xue Yubin via Getty Images
Giant panda Hua Yan, from the China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas, is released into the wild at Liziping Nature Reserve in Ya’an, China, in October 2016.

Zoos “carefully breed their animals as if they might be called upon at any moment to release them, like Noah throwing open the doors to the ark,” Emma Marris wrote in the 2021 book Wild Souls: Freedom and flourishing in the non-human world. “But that day of release never quite seems to come.”

Zoos rarely reintroduce animals to the wild because they don’t often survive, Ryan said.

A dozen or so captive pandas have been released in China so far, and at least a few of them have died. The first panda scientists ever released, named Xiang Xiang (or “Lucky”), died in 2007, less than a year after his return to the wild. He likely fell out of a tree following a fight with wild-born pandas, according to multiple news reports.

“Any reintroduction program has an inherent challenge: You’re increasing the potential for the animal to die,” said Jake Owens, director of conservation at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens. “The nice thing about zoos is that they do provide really high care.”

Owens and some other researchers argue that captive breeding can be an essential tool to avert extinction. It’s helped species like the endangered California condor recover, he says. Zoos and breeding facilities also help people fall in love with pandas, he said, which has put pressure on China to conserve their habitat.

But using zoo animals as inspiration for conservation has its limits, Marris argues. “There’s no unambiguous evidence that zoos are making visitors care more about conservation or take any action to support it,” she writes. People go to the zoo, she added, to be entertained.

Some scholars also argue that campaigns to save charismatic animals have distorted the human relationship with nature. Pandas, and most other highly charismatic species, are only visible in zoos or protected areas far from cities, reinforcing the idea that nature is something to look at, something apart from ourselves. Yet we all exist within ecosystems and depend on the services they provide, from water purification to crop pollination.

A crowd of people smile while taking photos. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images
Visitors take photographs of giant panda cub Xiang Xiang at Ueno Zoological Gardens in Tokyo, Japan, in February 2018.
 Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images
Seven-month-old panda cub Xiang Xiang rests on a tree stump as adoring fans photograph her.

Indeed, most of the world’s remaining biodiversity exists alongside humanity — all 8 billion of us. To conserve wildlife, people will need to steward the plants and animals in their own backyards, in cities, in places they consider their home, said David Jachowski, a professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University.

The environmental movement is changing. In recent decades, large environmental groups have adopted a more ecosystem-scale approach to their work.

In a previous interview with Vox, Marco Lambertini, then the head of WWF International, said that using pandas and tigers to inspire the public to care about wildlife was incredibly effective. That approach helped WWF grow into the world’s largest environmental organization. But he acknowledged that the nonprofit could have done a better job at “connecting the dots,” linking wildlife to ecosystems and all the benefits they provide for people. (WWF told Vox that ecosystem-based approaches have always been core to the organization’s strategy.)

Perhaps, then, it doesn’t make sense to have a single species as the mascot for conservation.

If there were one animal to represent the movement to conserve the natural world, the panda is probably the wrong one. It could be the weasel, Jachowski says; they’re predators that help sustain the food chain. Other researchers have argued that even earthworms would be better candidates.

Worms and weasels might not have the appeal of pandas. But they’re linchpins in a complex web of life that’s unraveling before our eyes. To sustain these and so many other underrated animals — the moths and flies, the bats and shrews — is to sustain the world’s ecosystems. It is to sustain ourselves.

Benji Jones is a senior environmental reporter at Vox, covering biodiversity loss and climate change. Before joining Vox, he was a senior energy reporter at Insider. Benji previously worked as a wildlife researcher.

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Extinction or adaptation? The plague of wildfires in Chile is a warning for our future

Retracing Darwin’s journey through South America, I had an ominous premonition about environmental crisis

Amidst rapidly intensifying global climate disasters, Chile has become the latest casualty. Fueled by strong winds and a heat wave, recent forest fires have killed more than a hundred people. El Niño, a cyclical climate phenomenon, created hazardous conditions prior to the fires by contributing to heat and drought, while global warming drove temperatures upward. For years, however, Chile has been suffering from such drought, which has dried up forests and depleted water supplies. Indeed, over the past decade, almost two million hectares of land have burnt to a crisp. Confronted by one of the worst tragedies in his country’s recent history, President Gabriel Boric declared a two-day period of national mourning in February. Though certainly destructive in terms of size and scope, I was not surprised by the fires. In the weeks leading up to the disaster, I was making my way through the country in tandem with research and a book project concerning Charles Darwin’s legacy in the context of climate change. The naturalist, who traveled throughout Chile and South America aboard H.M.S. Beagle, between 1832 to 1835 would not have denied the environment is changing; however, the pace of current day natural catastrophes would have undoubtedly concerned him.  As I roughly retraced Darwin’s route, I became aware of the threat of forest fires. In Torres del Paine National Park, I spotted a glacier in the distance, though such picturesque scenes were interrupted by the sight of burnt patches of trees. To be sure, not all fires are negative, since they can help get rid of dead vegetation or encourage forest clearings featuring greater species diversity. However, my guide explained that local fires linked to human error and carelessness have become more intense and difficult to extinguish. Climate change, he added, has contributed to such blazes amid low humidity and elevated temperatures. Speaking to members of a forest brigade, I learned that seasons had now become unpredictable and “super different.” Fires, meanwhile, posed a risk to beloved wildlife species such as pumas and South Andean deer. What are the chances that Chile’s unfavorable ecological picture can be reversed? During his travels, Darwin explored the island of Chiloé where he observed houses made of alerce, also known as Fitzroya cupressoides. The naturalist named the tall deciduous tree after Beagle captain Robert Fitzroy. To his credit, Darwin recognized that planting a mixture of species can result in faster growth than species planted individually. However, the naturalist was also a product of his time, and regretted that locals in the vicinity had not cleared the woods to make efficient use of natural resources. Waterfall at Torres del Paine National Park in Chile (Photo courtesy of Nikolas Kozloff) Such “extractivist” approaches haven’t served Chile well over time, however — so says Carlos Leiva, director of the non-governmental organization Andean Alerce. Though logging alerce has been outlawed, illegal deforestation has continued to plague Chiloé, while native forest has been replaced by tree plantations. This in turn has disrupted the hydrological cycle on Chiloé, which is already suffering from water scarcity. Could forest fires be related to underlying practices of extractivismo? Speaking to me in Puerto Montt, a city located near the island, Leiva expressed concern about the increased frequency of fires. Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. In other areas of the country hit by recent heat and drought, large plantations full of flammable trees lie in close proximity to cities and towns. Eucalyptus, a common tree found on plantations, burns relatively rapidly. In view of these trends, experts agree that plantations make the landscape much more prone to fire as opposed to maintaining intact native forests. Moreover, in contrast to native forest, which exhibits a wide spectrum of vegetation and animal species, plantations display the most homogeneous conditions possible. Traveling north, I felt suffocated by the heat during an interminably long bus ride. Peering out the window, I spotted large forest plantations along the highway sporting rows and rows of uniform trees, just some of the more than three million hectares of forest monoculture which has turned Chile into a leading cellulose exporter. Just how much specific blame can be pinned on the Boric administration for Chile’s dire environmental straits is up for debate: though the forestry sector has been poorly regulated, last year the president launched a national plan to prevent, mitigate and fight forest fires to make the forestry industry more resilient to climate change. The government also increased funding for firefighting, though needless to say, such moves did little to prevent recent blazes. What are the chances that Chile’s unfavorable ecological picture can be reversed? For answers, I caught up with Felipe and Constanza Espinosa of the Chilean Glacier Foundation at a café in Santiago. Felipe, the management and operations director for the group, said he was gratified by a substantial 2019 climate change protest in the capital. The momentum seemed to continue with the election of Boric in late 2021. A 36-year-old former lawmaker and the most leftist-leaning leader since Salvador Allende, the new president called for constitutional reform. Burnt Vegetation at Torres del Paine National Park in Chile (Photo courtesy of Nikolas Kozloff) My contact was heartened by environmental provisions in the draft package seeking to protect glaciers. Ambitious in scope, the reform also proposed granting rights to animals and nature, while pledging to deal with climate challenges and biodiversity loss. Chipping away at extractivismo, the draft abandoned the term “natural resources” in favor of “natural common goods.”However, the new constitution was resoundingly defeated by voters. Society must recognize that “nature isn’t infinite” and impose limits on the use of natural resources. Constanza, Felipe’s sister and the foundation’s director of communications and outreach, did not hold grand expectations for the government. Despite radical constitutional terminology, she remarked that the Ministry of the Environment still focused on managing natural resources, as opposed to truly protecting the environment. On the other hand, considering Chile’s environmental distress, could Boric become a spokesperson for international climate action in the mold of, say, former Bolivian President Evo Morales? The country is responsible for a tiny fraction of world-wide emissions, yet Chile is particularly vulnerable to drought and desertification. A more combative Boric seemed unlikely, she answered, given the president doesn’t seem interested in challenging the Global North, but rather maintaining friendly relations. It’s the last day of my stay in Santiago before catching a late-night flight back to New York. In the midst of record temperatures and heat alerts, not to mention the onset of Chile’s deadly wildfires, I’m contemplating Darwin’s legacy once again. Apocalyptic extinction or adaptation? The sobering new reality seems apropos as I sit down with Bárbara Saavedra, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Chile. Considering Chile’s climate emergency, she says, society must recognize that “nature isn’t infinite” and impose limits on the use of natural resources. An evolutionary biologist, Saavedra is concerned about charismatic animal species such as Darwin’s frog, which is facing an uphill conservation battle like other amphibians, and Darwin’s fox, whose population has become diminished and fragmented. And what of Boric — has the young and idealistic president turned out to be a political disappointment? “The constitutional reform wasn’t his defeat,” she says, “but rather a defeat of our entire country.” Pausing, she adds, “on the other hand, I don’t see the reform as a defeat, but rather as forming part of a long-term process which is challenging and still hasn’t played itself out entirely. I’m not a politician, but I believe there will be other opportunities in future. Even without the reform, however, we have other laws and tools at our disposal to resolve our environmental problems, and there is sufficient willingness to measure up to our challenges.” Read more about climate change

The Extinction of the Giant Ape: Scientists Solve Long-Standing Mystery

In the karst landscapes of southern China, giant apes, known as Gigantopithecus blacki, once traversed the terrain. These massive creatures, standing three meters tall and...

An artist’s impression of a group of G. blacki within a forest in southern China. Credit: Garcia/Joannes-Boyau (Southern Cross University)In the karst landscapes of southern China, giant apes, known as Gigantopithecus blacki, once traversed the terrain. These massive creatures, standing three meters tall and weighing about 250 kilograms, are considered distant relatives of humans. Although they vanished before humans settled in the area, the reasons for their extinction remain largely a mystery. The only evidence of their former presence consists of approximately 2000 fossilized teeth and four jawbones.New evidence from this region published in Nature, uncovered by a team of Chinese, Australian, and US researchers, demonstrates beyond doubt that the largest primate to walk the earth went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, unable to adapt its food preferences and behaviors, and vulnerable to the changing climates which sealed its fate.“The story of G. blacki is an enigma in paleontology – how could such a mighty creature go extinct at a time when other primates were adapting and surviving? The unresolved cause of its disappearance has become the Holy Grail in this discipline,” says paleontologist and co-lead author Professor Yingqi Zhang, from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP). “The IVPP has been excavating for G. blacki evidence in this region for over 10 years but without solid dating and a consistent environmental analysis, the cause of its extinction had eluded us.”Extensive Research ProjectDefinitive evidence revealing the story of the giant ape’s extinction has come from a large-scale project collecting evidence from 22 cave sites spread across a wide region of Guangxi Province in southern China. The foundation of this study was the dating.“It’s a major feat to present a defined cause for the extinction of a species, but establishing the exact time when a species disappears from the fossil record gives us a target timeframe for an environmental reconstruction and behavior assessment,” says co-lead author, Macquarie University geochronologist Associate Professor Kira Westaway.Digging into the hard cemented cave sediments containing a wealth of fossils and evidence of G. blacki. Credit: Kira Westaway (Macquarie University)“Without robust dating, you are simply looking for clues in the wrong places.”Six Australian universities contributed to the project. Macquarie University, Southern Cross University, Wollongong University and the University of Queensland used multiple techniques to date samples. Southern Cross also mapped G. blacki teeth to extract information on the apes’ behaviors. ANU and Flinders University studied the pollen and fossil-bearing sediments in the cave respectively, to reconstruct the environments in which G. blacki thrived and then disappeared.Dating Techniques and Environmental AnalysisSix different dating techniques were applied to the cave sediments and fossils, producing 157 radiometric ages. These were combined with eight sources of environmental and behavioral evidence, and applied to 11 caves containing evidence of G blacki, and also to 11 caves of a similar age range where no G. blacki evidence was found.The location of many caves including two G. blacki bearing caves. Credit: Yingqi Zhang (IVPP- CAS)Luminescence dating, which measures a light-sensitive signal found in the burial sediments that encased the G. blacki fossils, was the primary technique, supported by uranium-series (US) and electron-spin resonance (US-ESR) dating of the G. blacki teeth themselves.“By direct-dating the fossil remains, we confirmed their age aligns with the luminescence sequence in the sediments where they were found, giving us a comprehensive and reliable chronology for the extinction of G. blacki,” says Southern Cross University geochronologist Associate Professor Renaud Joannes-Boyau.Insights from Dental AnalysisUsing detailed pollen analysis, fauna reconstructions, stable isotope analysis of the teeth, and a detailed analysis of the cave sediments at a micro level, the team established the environmental conditions leading up to when G blacki went extinct. Then, using trace element and dental microwear textural analysis (DMTA) of the apes’ teeth, the team modeled G. blacki’s behavior while it was flourishing, compared to during the species’ demise.The G. blacki bearing cave of Zhang Wang lies 150 m above the valley floor making for a tough climb every day to conduct excavations. Credit: Kira Westaway (Macquarie University)“Teeth provide a staggering insight into the behavior of the species indicating stress, diversity of food sources, and repeated behaviors,” says Associate Professor Joannes-BoyauThe findings show G.blacki went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, much earlier than previously assumed. Before this time, G. blacki flourished in a rich and diverse forest.Environmental Changes and Comparative AdaptationBy 700,000 to 600,000 years ago, the environment became more variable due to the increase in the strength of the seasons, causing a change in the structure of the forest communities.Orangutans (genus Pongo) – a close relative of G. blacki – adapted their size, behavior, and habitat preferences as conditions changed. In comparison, G. blacki relied on a less nutritious backup food source when its preferences were unavailable, decreasing the diversity of its food. The ape became less mobile, had a reduced geographic range for foraging, and faced chronic stress and dwindling numbers.“G. blacki was the ultimate specialist, compared to the more agile adapters like orangutans, and this ultimately led to its demise,” says Professor Zhang.Associate Professor Westaway says: “With the threat of a sixth mass extinction event looming over us, there is an urgent need to understand why species go extinct.“Exploring the reasons for past unresolved extinctions gives us a good starting point to understand primate resilience and the fate of other large animals, in the past and future.”Reference: “The demise of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki” by Yingqi Zhang, Kira E. Westaway, Simon Haberle, Juliën K. Lubeek, Marian Bailey, Russell Ciochon, Mike W. Morley, Patrick Roberts, Jian-xin Zhao, Mathieu Duval, Anthony Dosseto, Yue Pan, Sue Rule, Wei Liao, Grant A. Gully, Mary Lucas, Jinyou Mo, Liyun Yang, Yanjun Cai, Wei Wang and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, 10 January 2024, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06900-0

Survivors of the Ice Age: How Did the Brown Bear Beat Extinction?

The brown bear is one of the largest terrestrial carnivores alive today, with a broad distribution throughout the Northern Hemisphere. In contrast to numerous other...

The study of ancient brown bear genomes reveals that their survival through the last Ice Age involved significant losses in range and genetic diversity, underscoring the importance of historical genetic studies in conservation efforts and future wildlife management. Credit: SciTechDaily.comThe brown bear is one of the largest terrestrial carnivores alive today, with a broad distribution throughout the Northern Hemisphere. In contrast to numerous other large carnivores that faced extinction by the end of the last Ice Age (cave bear, sabretoothed cats, cave hyena), the brown bear is one of the lucky survivors that made it through to the present. The question has puzzled biologists for close to a century – how was this so?Brown bears are ecologically flexible and have a broad dietary range. While they are carnivores, their diets can also consist primarily of plant matter making them adaptable to environmental changes. However, brown bears also experienced extensive range reductions and regional extinctions during the last Ice Age. Brown bears used to occupy a much wider range including Ireland, Honshu, the largest island of Japan, and Quebec (Canada).Did the decline or disappearance of bear populations in certain areas happen because bears left those places for better ones that they still currently live, or did unique groups of bears with distinct genes inhabit those areas and go extinct, leading to a loss in the overall diversity of the species? Genetic Studies and InsightsBy studying the genomes of ancient brown bears dated to between 3,800 and 60,000 years old, including several individuals from outside their current range, researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the University of Yamanashi, Japan sought to address this question by investigating the evolutionary relationships between brown bears across space and time.Their study showed that brown bears did not simply move with the shifting environment, but populations went extinct. “Our analyses showed that ancient brown bears represent genetic diversity absent in today’s populations,” says Takahiro Segawa, lead author of the study. “While brown bears survived global extinction, they suffered considerable losses of their historical range and genetic diversity.” This new perspective highlights a crucial period in the brown bear’s history and that they also faced challenges during and after the last Ice Age.“As we continue to grapple with the challenges of coexistence between humans and wildlife, insights from the deep past are invaluable in shaping a sustainable future,” adds Michael Westbury, the senior author of the study. “Although studying recent specimens can provide some insights, by including samples from the past and from areas a species no longer exists, we can better quantify how patterns of current diversity arose, and inform predictions about how they may respond to future environmental change.”Reference: “The origins and diversification of Holarctic brown bear populations inferred from genomes of past and present populations” by Takahiro Segawa, Alba Rey-Iglesia, Eline D. Lorenzen and Michael V. Westbury, 24 January 2024, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2023.2411

Inner ear of extinct ape species is overlooked aspect of human bipedal evolution, study finds

Described by scientists as a "bony labyrinth," the inner ear provides many clues as to the origin of our species

The inner ear may not seem like a particularly bony place, but human ears in fact have three small bones (also known as ossicles): the malleus, the incus and the stapes. While most people would assume that these bones are necessary for hearing, one would not imagine that they relate much to how we walk. Yet according to Chinese and American scientists working together for a study in the journal The Innovation, the ear bones of ancient apes can teach us a lot not only about our primate ancestors, but also about ourselves. In a sense, the inner ear bones of the Lufengpithecus is a missing link in the evolutionary history of human locomotion. It all comes down to bipedalism, or the fact that humans walk on two legs. Because our various primate ancestors were often quadrupedal (walking on four legs), evolutionary scientists have often wondered how we made the shift from being a four-legged species to one that relies on two legs. The experts turned to the seemingly obvious places for answers: They studied the bones of ancient monkeys when they came from their limbs, pelvis, shoulders and spine. Yet in The Innovation study, the team of scientists looked instead to the inner ear. They specifically chose the remains of a Lufengpithecus, an ape from China that has been extinct for 7 to 8 million years. "The semicircular canals, located in the skull between our brain and the external ear, are critical for our sense of balance and position when we move, and they provide a fundamental component of our locomotion that most people are probably unaware of," Zhang Yinan, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, said in a press statement. "The size and shape of the semicircular canals have mathematical correlation with how mammals, including apes and humans, move around their environment. Using modern imaging techniques, we are able to visualize the internal structure of fossil skulls and study the anatomical details of the semicircular canals to reveal how extinct mammals moved." After doing this, the scientists observed that the Lufengpithecus inner ear revealed an animal that moved in ways unlike anything previously known about ancient or modern primates. Instead, it is believed that the primate moved around by combining various motion types — clambering, climbing, bipedalism, quadrupedalism and forelimb suspension. The ancestors of the Lufengpithecus did not move anything like this — their locomotion was more analogous to what we see today among gibbons in Asia — and humans developed their bipedalism afterward. In a sense, the inner ear bones of the Lufengpithecus is a overlooked connection in the evolutionary history of human locomotion. As the authors of the study explain, it is because the inner ear bones yield information about the locomotion of primates that cannot be found through traditional methods. "The bony labyrinth of the inner ear of vertebrates houses the peripheral vestibular system comprised of three fluid-filled semicircular canals that are functionally tied to sense of balance, spatial orientation, posture, and body movements," the authors explain. "This, in turn, is linked to modes of locomotion among living and extinct taxa." Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. "The dramatic increase in the average evolution rate of semicircular canals" within these apes may illuminate that "the rapid evolution of bipedalism in the human lineage in response to gradual global cooling." Interestingly, natural climate change may have also played a role in this ear evolution. After observing that evolutionary rates tend to slow down as global temperatures rise, the authors point out that "the dramatic increase in the average evolution rate of semicircular canals" within these apes may illuminate that "the rapid evolution of bipedalism in the human lineage in response to gradual global cooling." The Lufengpithecus lived during a warm period in the Pliocene era, one that "marks the beginning of Plio-Pleistocene continuous cooling and the onset of Northern Hemisphere alaciation. Against the backdrop of global cooling, the increase of grassy vegetation driven by regional-scale environmental factors may be the trigger for the accelerated evolution of" primates and humans walking on two legs in Africa. Studying our primate relatives has shed enormous light on our own evolution. A paper last year in the journal iScience studied chimpanzees and bonobos to determine if they possess a trait known as "vocal functional flexibility." Vocal functional flexibility refers to an animal's ability to produce complex sounds that form speech, as opposed to the more simple sounds that come forward from screaming, crying, laughing or making other basic sounds. Humans are not born with vocal functional flexibility but rather develop it over stages, and it is considered one of the prerequisites to creating actual speech. In their research, the authors of the iScience study discovered that grunting chimpanzees from newborns through to ten-year-old youths display vocal functional flexibility. "The logic is, if we find good evidence for something in humans and good evidence for something in chimpanzees, then we’re kind of justified in making the inference that this was also a trait that was held by the last common ancestor," Dr. Derry Taylor, the paper's corresponding author and a professor at the University of Portsmouth, told Salon at the time. "So we can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that whatever those vocal communication systems were like, they probably at least had this type of flexibility.” Another study — this one published last year in the journal Current Biology — involved scientists performing a magic trick known as the "French drop effect" in front of three types of monkeys: common marmosets, Humboldt's squirrel monkeys and yellow-breasted capuchin monkeys. The trick involves a scientist putting food in one hand, presenting it to the money and then putting their other hand over the treat while appearing to grab it. In fact, the scientists did not grab the treat with their second hand, therefore leading those monkeys that had opposable thumbs to be surprised when discovering it was still in the first hand. Yet the one species of monkey in the group that lacks opposable thumbs, the marmosets, were less likely to be fooled by the trick because they lacked the same digital frame of reference. "It tells us something about how we think without work," Dr. Nicky Clayton, a professor at the University of Cambridge and corresponding author on the paper — explained to Salon at the time. "We know this because we know . . . there's this massive power in this non-verbal communication. And then I think of seeing non-human animals respond in that way to these non-verbal stimuli. It creates all kinds of questions in your mind, doesn't it? Why is it so soothing to us? What does it mean for the animals that watch it?" Whether it is in shedding light on the origins of human locomotion and speech or helping us understand our very sense of selves, scientists who study primates both living and extinct continue to learn a lot more about human beings.

Costa Rica University Brings Bees and Farmers Together for Sustainability

Bees have long been at risk of extinction, posing a grave threat to global food production, which relies on them for pollination of approximately 75% of foodstuffs worldwide. Some analyses suggest that if bees were to vanish, life on Earth could be sustained for a mere five years longer. Recognizing the critical need to protect […] The post Costa Rica University Brings Bees and Farmers Together for Sustainability appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Bees have long been at risk of extinction, posing a grave threat to global food production, which relies on them for pollination of approximately 75% of foodstuffs worldwide. Some analyses suggest that if bees were to vanish, life on Earth could be sustained for a mere five years longer. Recognizing the critical need to protect these vital insects and the benefits they bring to both flora and humanity, the Interdisciplinary Experimental Farm of Agroecological Models (Feima) at the Atlantic Campus of the University of Costa Rica (UCR), situated in Turrialba, has launched the Social Action Project: Establishment of Meliponariums. Meliponariums are structures constructed of wooden boxes where bees, specifically meliponas, build their hives. Notably, these boxes are crafted from entirely natural materials without any added chemicals and can be made from various types of wood readily available in the country, making their production straightforward. The primary goal of this initiative is twofold: to demonstrate that agricultural and human activities need not be detrimental to bees and to educate various stakeholders, including farm owners and institutions, about the management and vital contributions of these structures to bee preservation and environmental health. The bees housed at the Atlantic Campus are unique in that they belong to the meliponas species, which lack stingers and thus pose no threat to humans. While they typically produce minimal honey, they are exceptionally adept at generating propolis, a resin used by bees in nest construction. Notably, propolis possesses potent antibiotic and antiviral properties, making it a valuable resource in natural medicine for combating viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Dennis Barquero Bejarano, a researcher at the Atlantic Campus and agronomy instructor, elucidated the distinctive traits of meliponas and underscored the importance of preserving their habitat for their continued survival. The presence of bees hovering over crops heralds two pieces of good news: firstly, agricultural production benefits from their pollination, and secondly, it signifies the adoption of sound farming practices conducive to bee preservation. The meliponariums at the Atlantic Campus serve as indicators of environmentally friendly cultivation practices, particularly concerning meliponas. Professor Barquero highlighted practices such as abstaining from burning or using agrochemicals on weeds, as bees play a vital role in pollinating these plants. These spaces serve as valuable learning environments for students to acquire knowledge about sustainable agricultural practices. The impact of meliponariums extends beyond university grounds, reaching agricultural farms, environmental institutions, and local communities in Turrialba. Through outreach efforts such as workshops and the dissemination of agricultural best practices manuals, knowledge about bee conservation and sustainable farming techniques is shared and promoted in the region. The post Costa Rica University Brings Bees and Farmers Together for Sustainability appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

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