When a Billion Chinese Jump (14 page)

To prove his point, he took me to the nursery, where there were too many newborns for the incubators, so three or four tiny cubs dozed on blankets on the floor. Next door, the pandagarten was similarly crowded with ten one-year-olds vying playfully for the top spot on a tree branch. More mature pandas had to be rotated between the spacious forested enclosures on the hillside and the narrow concrete pens close to the entrance. As we wandered among them, Zhang said his target was a captive population of 300 by 2016 (up from 120 in 2006), which would guarantee the survival of the species for at least a hundred years.

Zhang told me his breeding techniques had been developed after twenty years of trial and error. No experiment, it seemed, was too bizarre. Concerned that the captive-bred pandas might lack basic instincts, the keepers provided sex education in the form of wildlife videos showing the animals mating in the forests. When this panda porn failed to boost the beasts’ sex drives, the scientists tried the remedy used by millions of humans: Viagra. “We’ll never do that again,” Zhang said with a wry smile. “The panda was excited for twenty-four hours. We had to beat his erect penis with a stick.”

I laughed in sympathetic horror. Funnier and more pitiful still was the matchmaking deception used to minimize the risk of inbreeding. Male pandas were a discerning bunch. Left to their own devices, they would all mate with the sexiest females, which would shrink an already small genetic stock. To avoid this, researchers had to find a partner for even the least alluring females. How did they do that? “We tricked them,” Zhang said with another mischievous grin. The ruse was to put a fertile and attractive female into a breeding pen, where she left scratch marks and droppings before being taken away. A male panda was then introduced. Sniffing around, he grew excited to the point of sexual incontinence. That was the point for the zookeepers to bring in the new, less attractive female scented with the urine of the animal she replaced. The “ugly panda” was introduced into the mating pen rear end first, so the male could not see the face of his partner until they finished copulating.

“Don’t they get upset?” I asked, incredulously.

“Oh yes,” Zhang replied. “When the males find out, they get very angry and start fighting the female. We have had to use firecrackers and a water hose to separate them.”

I laughed louder and cringed more deeply, but we had not yet reached the bottom of this well of indignity for China’s national symbol.

Artificial insemination is far more effective than a blind date as a means of taking advantage of the three-day fertility window of a female panda.
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How, I wondered aloud, did the zookeepers harvest the semen? Since being shown, giant pandas have never seemed quite so cute and innocent.

Zhang took me to a lab, where researchers displayed a selection of large metal probes. These instruments were inserted into the anus of a sedated male, connected to an electricity supply, and then charged ever more powerfully until the panda ejaculated.
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Animal husbandry was not a subject for the fainthearted.

Such practices are the consequence of viewing animals primarily as an economic resource. Pandas make money. They are rented out to overseas zoos or nature parks for up to a million dollars a year.
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This generates suspicions that the breeding center was yet another rare-animal farm.
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That may be a little unfair on Zhang, who seemed genuinely concerned for his subjects. But, at the very least, it is a diversion from the more important task of conserving the wild population in their natural habitat.

Such concerns prompted the World Wide Fund for Nature, which uses the giant panda as its logo, to quietly drop support for Wolong in the early 1990s. Within China too there was a debate about its usefulness. Many zoologists, including Pan Wenshi, a leading exponent of eco-civilization theory, and Professor Wang Song, the founder of the China Species Red List, have distanced themselves from the work done at Wolong and similar facilities.

Many zoologists criticize the central assumption used to justify the breeding program, namely that giant pandas are naturally inadequate mates because they have short penises, narrow vaginas, and a low sex drive.
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Many studies suggest panda inadequacy is a myth, that the animals breed without difficulty in the wild,
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and that the reproductive problems, which appear to occur mainly in zoos, are not surprising in an unnatural habitat under constant surveillance.

I asked Zhang whether he was commercially motivated. No, he insisted, the ultimate goal was to build up the captive population so it could one day replenish the low numbers in the wild. He proved far more sincere than the tiger farmers of Xiongsen, but no more successful. Zhang’s team later released a captive-bred panda into the wild for the first time. Xiang Xiang
was killed by rivals in less than a year.
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But Zhang insists the release program will continue. As with breeding, he hopes trial-and-error experiments will eventually result in success.

But there is a danger that the reliance on money and science will distract efforts from the core conservation problems of development and consumption. The giant pandas at Wolong have had more money and attention lavished on them than the majority of the world’s population. Cubs born there have a better chance of surviving than human babies in more than a dozen countries.
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But outside captivity, where the animals could not generate rents of a million dollars a year, the situation is very different.

The wild panda population remains precariously small, despite efforts to protect its natural habitat. One of the most encouraging conservation developments of recent years was a government’s pledge in 2005 to expand and connect the scattered nature reserves in the Min mountain range, which is home to Wolong and almost half of the world’s 1,590 wild pandas.
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More than the captive-breeding program, this could have improved the panda’s long-term chances of survival. But the well-intentioned creation of reserves was compromised by economic development. Roads, bridges, and dams were still being built in the protected areas, cutting the panda communities off from each other.

The survival of the panda is crucial for other creatures that share the same ecosystem. Like the tiger, it is an “umbrella species.” By protecting the habitats of such wide-ranging beasts, many smaller—and less attractive—creatures can be protected too. This is vital for species that taste better and look worse. Darwin never mentioned survival of the cutest, but it is a reality on a planet dominated by mankind. The public is willing to donate time and money to conserve big-eyed creatures but rarely considers amphibians, insects, or plant life.
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Many snakes and turtles are being eaten into extinction.
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The saddest example is that of the giant Yangtze softshell turtle. The last two in the world are at Suzhou Zoo. They are aged 80 and 100, but zookeepers have tried to mate them without success. Once they go, the earth will have lost another magnificent creature.

Conservation is failing in China. That is the view I have heard again and again in discussions with biodiversity experts, former officials, and environmental journalists. Captive breeding can prevent some threatened species
used in traditional medicine from dying out completely, but overall wildlife is being decimated. The despondent view of John MacKinnon, one of the first foreign experts to work in China, is typical. “I’ve been doing biodiversity conservation for forty years,” he told me. “It is a bit depressing. We are doing more things, in more sophisticated ways, and yet destruction has outpaced us. I have written so many technical reports, but I have preached to an audience that doesn’t believe me.”

Xie Yan, the head of the Wildlife Conservation Society of China, told me the problem was a lack of love for nature and animals, except in regard to how they could be consumed: “When I go out with people to watch wildlife, they often say, ‘That looks very good to eat.’ It is hard to change thousands of years of culture. Because Chinese people eat everything, they can kill anything.”
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Despite this grim prognosis, neither of them have given up. There are reasons for hope. The government is doing more than in the past. Species such as the Tibetan chiru and the gray snub-nosed monkey have been brought back from the brink. Public awareness is growing, particularly among the young urban middle class. Bird-watching is becoming popular, and no longer just for economic or culinary reasons. Small groups of young activists are trying to change consumer attitudes and put pressure on restaurants and markets.
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In academia, Zhao Qikun of the Kunming Institute of Zoology is among those calling for a more spiritual approach to nature. Peking University has set up the nation’s first Ecological Civilization Research Center, headed by Professor Pan, reportedly an opponent of captive breeding. President Hu Jintao has made the creation of an “eco-civilization” a goal of his “Scientific Development” program.

The Communist Party takes a utilitarian view of nature. Its leaders are aware that the limit of exploitation is creeping closer. Cadres are told they should do more to protect “natural resources necessary for production.” Western wildlife zoologists have also recognized that economic incentives are necessary for conservation, proposing the replacement of ineffective blanket bans with limited fee-generating hunting as a way for nature reserves to generate funds.
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International cash has come pouring in and conservation groups have grown both larger and more influential. But wildlife remains under ever-increasing pressure from climate change and economic development.

*

Until the baiji expedition, I had hoped that the threat to China’s wildlife could be averted by the use of money, intelligence, and technology. But after joining the world’s smartest, best-funded scientists in the search for the Yangtze dolphin, I realized there came a point when it was too late to do anything.

On my last day with the expedition, we set off on the
Kekao 1
just after dawn. Sharp early morning sunlight cut through the mist and shattered into glittering shards on the water. On deck, Wang Ding, China’s leading baiji expert, and Brent Stewart from the Hubbs-Seaworld Research Institute in San Diego were peering through the giant binoculars. Down below, Tomonori Akamatsu from Japan was listening for an audio trace with hydrophone omnidirectional equipment.

The baiji too relied on sonar. They navigated and communicated using a high- and low-frequency acoustic system. This sensitivity to sound was a handicap in the modern age. The increasing noise from ships’ engines disrupted their perception of the world.

After the last of six captive baiji, Qi Qi, died in the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology in 2002, the only records of the animal left behind were photographs, skeletons, and a single “sound image” of the dolphin’s 5,000-hertz whistle. When Akamatsu played it back on the boat, I told him it sounded mournful.

“No,” he replied. “It sounds like an engine. That’s the problem. In calm, quiet water, a baiji can communicate with other dolphins up to a kilometer away. But the noise from traffic makes it hard for them to do that.”

Back on deck, I looked out at speedboats, giant container ships, fishing vessels, and barges heaped with coal, cement, and gravel. If there were any surviving baiji, they must find it difficult to locate one another amid the chugs and shrieks of the engines.

There was still life on the river. “Pied kingfisher off the starboard bow,” cried a spotter. A few minutes later, another reported a small pod of porpoises. The sight briefly raised hopes. But the veteran Yangtze watcher Wang shook his head. “There are little more than a dozen. Last time we saw more than a hundred in this area. This also used to be where we saw the most baiji too. But now there are none.”

We were passing along the stretch of the river where the baiji was formerly
most plentiful. Everyone was on deck, peering through binoculars, eyes strained into a gray expanse. Blurred by the haze, the sky, mud banks, and river all merged into one. The loss of biodiversity and color appeared written on the landscape.

Near Chenglingji, acrid smoke billowed out of a coal-fired power plant, and a paper factory discharged an unceasing torrent of filthy water into the river. The smell was so pungent that the crew grimaced more than half a mile away. It marked the end of the stretch where hopes of finding a baiji alive were highest, but the world’s best spotters and advanced technology had failed to detect the telltale whistle or sight a single pale dorsal fin.

The mood on board darkened. Some began to ask angrily why mankind killed off the baiji. The rescue mission had become a whodunnit.

“Why does nobody pay attention to a species until there are almost none left? What’s wrong with human nature?” said Samuel Turvey, of the Zoological Society of London. The baiji, he said, was a mammal family that diverged twenty million years ago from other ancient types of dolphin. “Its loss would be a major blow to biological diversity. This isn’t a twig—it is a branch on the tree of life. To lose it would be so depressing. Yet nothing has been done for thirty years.”

There was to be no feel-good ending. The voyage that started out as a search ended as a farewell. Over 1,600 kilometers through the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, all the way to Shanghai, they failed to spot a single baiji. Soon after the expedition ended, the species was declared functionally extinct.
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Man had wiped out its first dolphin. The conservation dream team was too late.

I look back on the baiji expedition as the biggest story of my journalistic career. More than tsunami, earthquakes, World Cup tournaments, or G8 summits, the end of a species after twenty million years felt terrifyingly momentous. This was not just a piece of news. It was even more than history. It was an event on a geological timescale with disturbing implications for our own species. What were we doing to our world? How could we assume our species was developing and becoming more civilized when an animal once worshipped had been wiped out by neglect, greed, and human filth?