WASHINGTON — The tiny giant panda cub who died at the National Zoo on Sunday had unusual fluid in its abdomen and irregularities in its liver, the zoo’s chief veterinarian said Monday.
In announcing the preliminary findings from a necropsy performed on the 6½-day-old cub, veterinarian Suzan Murray said it was too early to know whether the abnormalities that were documented were factors in the cub’s death.
“Judging too much on the initial necropsy can be a little bit dangerous at times,” Murray said. “Something that might appear abnormal to you visually, when you look at it under a microscope, it may indeed be normal.”
She said lab tests on tissue samples, expected within the next week or so, could help identify the cause of death.
The cub’s heart and lungs appeared normal, suggesting that suffocation was not a factor. There was milk in the cub’s digestive tract, a sign that it had been nursing successfully.
Zoo officials said the cub’s mother, Mei Xiang, whose distressed vocalizations first alerted them that something had gone very wrong with the fragile newborn, appears to be coping well. She slept soundly in her den at the zoo’s panda exhibit and has ventured out to eat and drink and interact with her keepers — behaviors she had eschewed at the end of her pregnancy and since the cub was born Sept. 16.
However, Mei Xiang is still cradling a toy in her den, much as she cradled her cub during its brief life. Murray and zoo director Dennis Kelly said the cradling behavior is one sign that Mei Xiang has not transitioned away from the mothering role.
The cub’s sudden death upended, for now, all the plans for a new era of giant pandas at the National Zoo and in the Washington region. Zoo officials said it was too early to discuss what they might do about their pandas in the future. They said they had been in close communication with officials in China, which loaned Mei Xiang and her partner, Tian Tian, to the zoo.
In the six days since its birth, Mei Xiang had been holding the cub so close to her body, apparently to nurse it and keep it warm, that zoo officials had scarcely been able to glimpse it on the panda cam monitoring the den.
The cub was so small that the zoo did not yet know its sex. But Murray said Monday morning that it appears to have been female. Lab tests will confirm that finding, she said. Even without a conclusive ruling, she said, zoo officials have decided to refer to the cub as a “she.”
Giant panda cubs, like many newborns at the zoo, are extremely fragile. A total of six giant panda cubs have died at the zoo, going back to the 1980s. A seventh cub was stillborn. The only cub to survive into maturity has been Tai Shan, who was born to Mei Xiang and Tian Tian in 2005 and was sent to China in 2010.
Zoo spokeswoman Pamela Baker-Marsoon said that as soon as keepers heard Mei Xiang making unusual noises Sunday, they realized, “This is not right. This is not good.”
Kelly said Mei Xiang “got up and moved off of where she was holding the cub and made a honk,” which was unusual for her. “We surmised that that was a distress call,” he said. The keepers also had stopped hearing the cub’s healthy squealing, which had gone on for a week and was a sign of a thriving newborn.
Within minutes, a team of four keepers and two veterinarians had assembled in the keepers’ office in the panda house. The effort to extract the cub from the den was delicate.
First, the keepers tried calling Mei Xiang out of the den, but that didn’t work, zoo officials said.
Then keepers Marty Dearie and Juan Rodriguez entered an area adjacent to the den, where they were protected by bars but could reach the cub if they could distract the mother.
Dearie did so by splashing honey water near her. At about 10:15 a.m., Rodriguez got the cub.
He handed it to Dearie, who rushed the cub to the keepers’ office, which is stocked with incubators and other emergency equipment.
Veterinarian Nancy Boedeker tried to intubate the cub to establish a good flow of oxygen, but its airway was too tiny, Kelly said. She then did heart massage for about 10 minutes, Kelly said, and stopped when it was clear that the cub could not be revived.
The cub was pronounced dead at 10:28 a.m.
Murray said at the news conference Monday that there was no sign of any traumatic injury to the cub and no evidence that Mei Xiang — whose weight is about 216 pounds, down from a normal weight of 240 — had caused the cub injury.
“We’d all felt that Mei Xiang had been a very good mother and had been very gentle with the cub, and indeed, that turns out to be the case,” she said.
“The cub was just beautiful,” Murray said on Sunday, her voice shaking. “Beautiful little body. Beautiful face, with the markings just beginning to show around the eye. Couldn’t have been more beautiful.”
The cub’s surprise birth came after five failed attempts to impregnate Mei Xiang, and zoo experts thought the chance of her having another cub was less than 10 percent.
“There are so many things that can go wrong in the first week of life,” Murray said.
In 2010, a newborn red panda cub died at the zoo. The male cub, born June 16, was found lifeless July 7 and was rushed to the zoo’s veterinary hospital, where its death was confirmed. The cub was the first red panda born at the zoo in 15 years. The zoo said there is a 50 percent mortality rate for red panda cubs born in captivity.
In the 1980s, five giant panda cubs were born to Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, who were given to the United States by China in 1972.
Ling-Ling had her first cub in 1983, but it died of pneumonia three hours later. She had another cub that was stillborn in 1984. In 1987, she had twins, which is not uncommon among giant pandas, experts say.
One of the twins died immediately and the other died of an infection four days later. She produced another cub in 1989, but it died of pneumonia 23 hours after it was born. Ling-Ling died in 1992, followed by Hsing-Hsing in 1999.
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