Old age cause of death for 4 wild giant pandas
By Liang Chao (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-07-23 07:10

Four wild giant pandas apparently died of old age this year at a major habitat in Northwest China's Gansu Province, one of their three major home ranges in China, a forestry official said on Friday.

"All of the dead giant pandas were found at Gansu's Bailongjiang Nature Reserve, an area of old-growth forests," said Cao Qingyao, spokesman for the State Forestry Administration (SFA), at a press conference in Beijing. The SFA monitors the area.

He ruled out the possibility of the deaths being caused by disease, injury, poaching or famine.

This is the first time the SFA has announced deaths of giant pandas in the wild. The animals are difficult to spot there because they live in thick bamboo, mostly in old-growth forests - their favourite habitat.

"Over the past few years there were cases of natural deaths of the animal, though we don't know exactly why," Cao said.

"Today we are capable of monitoring such things in major nature reserves with the help of improved technology such as infrared light facilities."

All four died at more than 25 years of age, which is equivalent to a human being being as old as 80, he added.

Pandas, which usually live alone and don't often meet other pandas aside from during mating season, can live for about 20 years in the wild.

Meimei, the world's longest living panda in captivity, was regarded as a "centenarian" when she died earlier this month in a South China zoo at age 36.

Early this year, two new nature reserves that cover about 180,000 hectares were set up for giant pandas at Bailongjiang in southern Gansu Province, bordering Southwest China's Sichuan Province, another major panda habitat.

More than 110 wild giant pandas have been found to be living in Gansu in recent years, according to the latest survey.

In recent years a monitoring network has been used based on panda droppings in Bailongjiang's dense forests.

China has 1,590 giant pandas in the wild, living in habitats covering more than 23,000 square kilometres across Sichuan and the northwest provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu, according to the latest SFA inventory.

At least 163 others are being raised in captivity or living in zoos worldwide.

At the end of last year, 65 nature reserves were set up for giant pandas, bringing half of their habitat under protection.

SFA's top official Zhou Shengxian said: "Shrinkage of habitat caused by worsening local ecosystems has more or less been controlled following China's rehabilitation of forestry resources since the 1990s."

(China Daily 07/23/2005 page1)

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