WASHINGTON – The round-the-clock pregnancy watch is down to its last few days, but keepers at the National Zoo still don’t know whether their nest-building, apple-cuddling, sleepy female giant panda is about to become a mother or not.
Friday, a hormone test of Mei Xiang’s urine kept their hopes alive, but pandas also can have false pregnancies that mimic real ones. Scientists had hoped to detect a fetus, which weighs a quarter-pound, by means of a sonogram, but Mei Xiang has refused to sit still for an ultrasound since June 20.
The hormone readings, though, tell them that the waiting should be over – one way or the other – by the middle of next week.
“It will be any time now,” zoo spokeswoman Peper Long said. “We’ll have a cub, or her hormones will go down to normal.”
Mei Xiang was artificially inseminated March 11. A daytime pregnancy watch began in mid-June after her hormone levels rose, escalating to the 24-hour watch June 27. Her hormone levels began falling about a week ago, as they should near the end.
This month, the panda will be 7 years old, prime breeding age. Most of the time, she is holed up in a back den at the Panda House, visible to the zoo’s pregnancy watchers only via one of 23 cameras in the indoor-outdoor enclosure. For now, the public can see the panda and her mate, Tian Tian, on the zoo’s Web site, but the cameras will go dark for 24 hours after a birth because the Animal Planet cable network bought exclusive rights, Long said.
Mei Xiang has been spending much of her time in a lethargic doze. She eats little. Sometimes she wakes up and holds an apple, sweet potato or rubber toy to her chest. Sometimes she pushes straw or bamboo around the floor into the shape of a nest.
Occasionally, she licks herself, and that is when the panda-watch volunteers lean forward eagerly, because if it goes on long enough, it could be the prelude to birth. The zoo’s previous pair of pandas produced five cubs in the 1980s, but none lived more than a few days.
Pandas are notoriously poor breeders. Females come into heat for two or three days a year, false pregnancies are common, and cubs are so small that sometimes their mother accidentally crushes them. This worsens their chances of survival in the wild, where only about 1,600 are left in the shrinking bamboo forests of China.
Mei Xiang and her mate, who arrived in 2000 on a 10-year loan from China, have had no offspring. Tian Tian has carried on as usual in recent days, romping outdoors and eating heartily.
The pair mated briefly in 2003, without result. They attempted to mate last year, after which Mei Xiang was vaginally inseminated and a false pregnancy followed. The procedure this year injected Tian Tian’s sperm directly into her uterus, and zoo officials say it has a 55 percent success rate.
“The hope is always there that suddenly she is going to jump up and do it right in front of your eyes,” said Nancy Schneck, who has volunteered at the Panda House for three decades.
Schneck finished her most recent three-hour solo shift Tuesday night, writing down panda behavior observations in response to a timer that goes off every five minutes. She is among 50 Friends of the National Zoo volunteers who are gathering data that spokesman Matt Olear said may someday help scientists diagnose a pregnancy by monitoring behavior.
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