Two new giant pandas will arrive at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., before the end of the year, according to an announcement Wednesday.
That couple will arrive around the time Atlanta’s pandas — Lun Lun, Yang Yang, and their children Xi Lun and Ya Lun — are shipped to China when Zoo Atlanta’s partnership with a Chinese breeding program ends.
Since November, Atlanta’s pandas have been the last in the United States. Zoos in Washington, San Diego and Memphis, Tennessee, have all sent their charismatic bears back to China. The end of breeding programs at U.S. zoos was blamed on cooling relations between the U.S. and China. But the announcement in Washington indicates that there is still strong support for maintaining this cooperative effort.
Credit: Ben Gray for the AJC
Credit: Ben Gray for the AJC
In February the San Diego zoo also announced that a pair of pandas would be returning to the zoo by the end of the year. The multinational breeding effort has helped bring the giant panda back from the edge of extinction.
The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute first received two giant pandas in 1972, when Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing were sent to the U.S. to celebrate President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China. The bears instantly became one of the biggest attractions at the zoo.
Similar cooperative programs began at other zoos. Zoo Atlanta welcomed Lun Lun and Yang Yang in 1999, under a contract with the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding that required all the couple’s offspring to be sent to China when they reached maturity.
The couple has been successful as parents, producing seven offspring, five of whom have been sent to China, and one of whom has fathered seven cubs of his own.
They have also become stars in Atlanta, engaging delighted visitors at the Grant Park facility and viewers of the “panda-cam” online.
Atlanta’s pandas are set to return to China “sometime in the fourth quarter” of the year, according to zoo spokesperson Rachel Davis.
The pandas being shipped to San Diego and Washington represent the first time in more than two decades that China has sent new pandas to the U.S.
Atlanta’s zoo officials were optimistic that a new agreement with China might be in the future. In February Raymond B. King, president and CEO of Zoo Atlanta, said “There’s a high level of mutual respect going both ways. They send delegations over to see how we’re doing, and they’ve never left with any criticism.”
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