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NZ red panda cub helps to curb global population decline

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Australia and New Zealand are continuing to make a valuable contribution to the survival of one of Asia's most at-risk animals, a New Zealand zoo director said Thursday.

Red panda in Wellington Zoo, New Zealand. [File photo]

Hamilton Zoo announced Thursday that it had successfully bred its first red panda after receiving authorization from the international red panda breeding program.

The cub was one of two born at the zoo on Dec. 9, but the smaller of the pair died soon after birth.

However, Hamilton Zoo director Stephen Standley told Xinhua, the zoo was pleased with its breeding program, which was supervised under the regional Australian program based in Sydney, Australia, and would aim for more.

"We're really pleased that we were able to achieve this on the first breeding attempt," Standley said in a phone interview.

The program restricts the numbers of red pandas believed to be fewer than 10,000 in the world and decreasing bred each year in order to properly manage their captive environments and to ensure variations in the gene pool by allowing breeding age animals to be exchanged among zoos.

"We have to breed to the space available, to try to have a steady number of cubs from each pair. It's very important that we follow the breeding recommendations," he said.

"The likelihood is that we'll only be authorized to allow two or three breedings, so we'll be aiming for about four youngsters here," he said.

Like the giant panda, the red panda almost exclusively eats bamboo shoots, but it is spread over a larger area around the Himalayas, with the western subspecies living mostly in northern India, Nepal and Bhutan and the Styan's red panda mainly in China and northern Myanmar.

Standley said he knew of no plans to reintroduce any of the Australian red pandas into the wild as part of the global program to boost the animal's numbers, but the zoo would be ready to contribute by breeding more if asked.

The Rotterdam-based global program for breeding and reintroduction to the wild would identify suitable animals for release depending on their genetic lineage, he said.

"They would pick animals whose genes were already well represented in the breeding program," he said.

The father of the new cub, Chito (9), had been transferred to Hamilton Zoo from Auckland Zoo in 2006, while mother Tayla (4) had come from a zoo in Canberra, Australia, in 2010. Both were first- time parents.

The cub, whose gender was yet to be identified, would probably go on public display at Hamilton Zoo next month, said Standley.

The cub had weighed 686 grams last week, up almost 300 grams from its previous weigh-in on Jan. 17.

"He's doubled in weight over the last two weeks so he's doing very well," said Standley.

Fourteen zoos in Australia and New Zealand together have 47 red pandas. In 2006, they recorded seven births of which four survived; in 2007, five births of which four survived; in 2008, four of which three survived; in 2009, all five of those born survived; and in 2010, three of the five born survived.

Classified as "vulnerable" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the red panda is threatened in the wild by deforestation and habitat fragmentation, as well as poaching for their fur.

Their scientific name is Ailurus fulgens, meaning "fire-colored cat" although the species are not cats, according to Hamilton Zoo. They are a striking reddish-brown color with white facial markings and a striped tail.