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Red panda births surprise Adelaide Zoo staff

Red panda births surprise Adelaide Zoo staff

Adelaide Zoo staff are celebrating a happy surprise, welcoming two baby red pandas without ever realising their mother was expecting.

Zookeeper Constance Girardi said staff were wary of getting too close to the mother Imandari because she was timid, so that meant they had not noticed her growing larger.

"We did see some signs of her being pregnant such as nest building earlier on in December, but those behaviours ceased so we thought it would be unlikely that she was pregnant," Ms Girardi said.

In late January, zoo staff were delighted to find two newborn cubs in the nest box of the red panda enclosure.

Adelaide Zoo also has two giant pandas on loan from China but they are yet to breed, despite annual efforts by staff to encourage them to mate.

Ms Girardi said red pandas and giant pandas might share a name but their breeding habits were completely different.


"The window of opportunity that giant pandas have to breed is extremely small whereas our red pandas have four-and-a-half months of breeding season," she explained.

"Our male red panda is kept continually with our female, so we do not need to intervene in any way."

In contrast, the zoo's giant pandas spend most of their time in separate enclosures.

Zoo staff said red pandas were actually more closely related to raccoons than to giant pandas.

As for the recent arrivals, the two males are yet to be given names.


Red pandas under threat in the wild


There are fewer than 10,000 red pandas left in the wild globally, environmental experts say, with the species under threat from loss of habitat and hunters who prize the animals' long tails.

Ms Girardi said Adelaide Zoo was playing a major role in worldwide captive breeding efforts.

"We have now had 46 [red panda] babies between 1975 and 2015 at Adelaide Zoo," she said.

"It is really important to secure a captive population that is strong until we can release the 'captive borns' back into the wild when it is safe."