Considering how rare it is for a giant panda to pop out even just one baby, you can imagine the excitement and hullabaloo that ensued when not one but two little balls of black and white fluff wobbled out into Beijing Zoo on Oct 13.
The twin sister pandas were actually born in Sichuan in May 2018 and made the trek up north earlier this year, but were only recently being deemed healthy enough to meet their adoring public. And you better believe that the crowds were there to greet them.
The crowds were out to get a first glimpse of the new additions last Sunday.
Now close to one and half years old, the new additions, named Meng Yu and Meng Bao, joined eight other pandas who already call Beijing’s Olympic Panda Pavilion home. The girls are actually already related to three male pandas among those eight, as they share the same father.
The twin sisters join eight other pandas in Beijing Zoo
Pandas are notoriously hard to breed in and outside of captivity. The males exhibit a sexual desire that puts them somewhere between hellbent on self-extinction and so feeble that they cannot find the wherewithal to fulfill basic mating duties. Couple that with the fact that females only have a single estrous cycle per year for two to seven days and are only actually fertile for 24 to 36 hours of those, and you have a pretty good recipe for a panda-free planet.
Despite pandas being less interested in making babies than doing almost anything else, improvements in breeding programs and insemination technology mean that their numbers are now slowly increasing. At their lowest point, in the 1970s, there were only 1,114 pandas thought to exist in the wild. That figure is now closer to 1,900.
With any luck, Meng Bao and Meng Yu will go on to live long and lazy panda lives, and maybe one day, have little cubs of their own. But not together, unless insemination technology really advances in the intervening decades.
Scroll to see the young panda twins doing more stupidly cute stuff:
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