World's first panda cub born to captive and wild parents

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The world's first giant panda cub with both captive and wild parents was born early Monday in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

The cub marked success in experiments to encourage captive pandas to mate with wild pandas in order to increase the genetic diversity of the captive stock, according to Zhang Zhizhong from China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda (CCRCGP).

The 15-year-old female giant panda Cao Cao gave birth to the cub at 2:17 am at the Hetaoping semi-wild training base. She started to show signs of pregnancy on July 1 and went into labor on July 30.

Caocao is a captive-bred panda who mated in the wild. /Xinhua Photo

The female cub weighed 216 grams, compared to the normal newborn weight of around 150 grams.

Wu Daifu with the training base attributed the cub's unusually high weight to the good health and appetite of the mother during pregnancy.

Wearing a positioning system and a recording device on her neck, Cao Cao was released into the wild on March 1. She lived there for nearly two months.

The recording device showed that Cao Cao went into heat on March 11 and mated with a wild male panda on March 23. The mating lasted for one minute and 30 seconds.

Cao Cao was born in the wild and was rescued by the CCRCGP in 2003 at two years old. She has delivered six cubs in captivity, including two pairs of twins.

For the most of the last seven years, she has lived at the Hetaoping training center, where she demonstrated strong adaptability to living in the wild.

(Source: Xinhua)

1545km