Pandas

[gridlore]

Last night, Kirsten and I ooh'ed and aah'ed over a PBS show about pandas. Lots over overly-cute baby pandas being born in a captive breeding program. Very heart warming stuff.

But...

Why can't we admit that the Panda is basically extinct? Even without habitat loss, the bloody things are doomed! They give birth to twins, but for some reason regularly reject one cub. This cutes the viable population each generation from the start, and the mortality rate before breeding is amazing. They are overly specialized in feeding, dependent on a single food source. They even have problems reproducing in the wild.. a scent recognition system has gotten so off whack that many pandas will refuse mating with anything but blood relatives! This is not good for genetic diversity.

There are battles we can win, and battles that we will loose no matter what we do. Pandas are the latter.

Give it up, and allow them the dignity of extinction.

Comments

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

Hi! (Randy from the Futurists and TML lists.)

I have to agree with you, actually--in terms of resources allocated to result produced, working on the panda is highly problematic. The only problem apart from the fact that conservationists are committed to the preservation of the panda is that if we give up on the panda, it could have a spillover effect onto other projects to preserve endangered species, which are often less prolific than pandas (California condors, frex).

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I was having a discussion in a similar area with djm4 earlier today. Two examples:-

a) An English charity called the Wetlands and Wildfowl Trust imported ruddy ducks to England in the 1950s and 1960s, for reasons which I now forget, but which no doubt appeared ecologically sound at the time. What they failed to realise was that the blessed creatures would migrate south in the winter and proceed to shag their little hearts out with the Spanish white-headed duck, which is vastly outnumbered by them and is in danger of disappearing as a distinguishable category in consequence. The Government has now given the Trust funding to kill all of them, and is considering passing legislation to force farmers to allow the Trust access to their land to do so. I am at a loss to understand why we are supposed to value the white-headed duck enough to spend public money on it, especially since the consensus appears to be that it will probably become extinct within a few decades anyway, and as far as anyone can tell seems quite happy with its current arrangements.

b) Djm4 then asked me whether I thought the New Zealand government was wrong to make arrangements to kill any cats which may stray onto the islands where they have set up reserves for the kakapo. Now, I care more about the kakapo than I do about the white-heaed duck, but I suspect this is due to the filmic and literary skills of David Attenborough and Douglas Adams more than any intrinsic quality of the kakapo itself, so I had to say that I did indeed think they were probably wrong. Still, I do kind of hope the cats stay away...

[(Anonymous)]

Think of it as.....evolution in action.

Rob

Turn France into a Panda Reserve?

[redroach.livejournal.com]

Despite the fact that bamboo doesn't naturally occur in Europe (or antartica), I think we could ship all the french to China, in exchange for turning france into a huge panda reserve.
Bulldoze the whole damned place, plant the bamboo and drop in pandas. They don't have to go extinct, yet.

Then again an animal that eats only on certain kind of food and has a fondness for screwing its siblings sounds a lot like some of the people I know here in East Texas.

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