Baby Panda Dies 3 Days After Birth
Posted August 30, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A panda cub at a zoo in Kobe, Japan died three days after its celebrated birth following a rare success in artificial insemination.
The Oji Kobe Zoo says on its Web site that the baby giant panda was pronounced dead Friday of an unknown cause.
The cub’s 12-year-old mother, Dan Dan, was the first giant panda since 1988 to conceive through artificial insemination in Japan. The captive breeding is part of a joint research project between Japan and China.
The zoo says the cause of the death is under investigation. The sex of the cub also had not been determined.
Earlier breeding attempts and artificial insemination between Dan Dan and her mate, Xing Xing, were unsuccessful.
The giant panda is revered as a national symbol of China as well as of friendship between the two Asian neighbours. Dan Dan came to Japan from China in 2000. Only about 1,600 pandas live in the wild, mostly in China’s southwestern Sichuan province, which was hit by an earthquake in May that killed nearly 70,000 people.
File photo.
