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Giant panda Tian Tian is not pregnant, says Edinburgh zoo Giant panda Tian Tian is not pregnant, says Edinburgh zoo
(about 9 hours later)
Edinburgh zoo has disclosed that its giant panda Tian Tian is no longer pregnant, after weeks of fevered anticipation that she would produce the first panda cub born in a British zoo. Hopes that Edinburgh Zoo's giant panda, Tian Tian, would produce the first panda cub born in Britain have been dashed after it emerged she was no longer pregnant.
The zoo's chief executive, Chris West, said he was saddened by the news. He said all the biological and behavioural evidence suggested Tian Tian had conceived and had carried a foetus until late into a pregnancy. Senior zoo officials said they were "incredibly disappointed" after biological and behavioural evidence showed Tian Tian had lost her baby late in pregnancy, reabsorbing the foetus after several indications she was close to giving birth.
"We are all saddened by this turn of events after so many weeks of waiting," West said. "Timings are difficult to pinpoint at this moment, but we had a meeting this morning where Tian Tian's behaviour and hormone results were reviewed and have come to the conclusion that it is very likely she has lost the pregnancy." Chris West, the zoo's chief executive, said: "We are all saddened by this turn of events after so many weeks of waiting. Such a loss has always been in our minds as a very real possibility, as it occurs in giant pandas as well as many other animals, including humans."
He added: "Such a loss has always been in our minds as a very real possibility, as it occurs in giant pandas as well as many other animals, including humans. The disclosure comes nearly six months after Tian Tian was artificially inseminated after failing to mate naturally with her partner, Yang Guang, in April.
"Our dedicated team of keepers, veterinary staff and many others worked tirelessly to ensure Tian Tian received the best care possible, which included remote observation and closing the panda enclosure to visitors to give her quiet and privacy." The zoo will soon start planning for next spring, when the pair will again try to mate during the female's narrow fertility window, which lasts some 36 hours. It often takes three or four attempts for a captive panda to successfully produce young.
Tian Tian was artificially inseminated on 22 April by sperm from two donors – her erstwhile partner at Edinburgh zoo, Yang Guang, and a now dead male from Berlin zoo, after she and Yang Guang failed to mate naturally. Iain Valentine, the zoo's director of conservation, said he was convinced that Tian Tian had been pregnant as a series of parallel, highly sensitive medical tests was supported by behaviour typical of pregnancy.
Her pregnancy has been prolonged and very unusual, and after nearly six months since her insemination was close to reaching a new record for a panda pregnancy. Dismissing suggestions the zoo had hyped up the pregnancy for commercial and prestige reasons, he said: "Our priority has been first of all managing the animals. At the same time, we've always tried to say to people that breeding pandas is, technically, incredibly challenging – it's a complex picture and it isn't fully understood. We've been using new science and new techniques."
West said Tian Tian had passed a "mucus plug" in mid-September, began producing colostrum, a form of pre-birth breast milk, and had a "prolonged secondary rise" in progesterone. But over the last few days, Tian Tian had returned to normal eating and behavioural patterns, indicating she was no longer pregnant. Edinburgh had used a standard test to measure the pregnancy hormone progesterone and a cutting-edge technique, previously unreported in panda conservation, which monitors levels of the complex chemical prostaglandin (or PGFM) in urine.
Panda pregnancies are notoriously difficult to follow accurately. There can be long delays between fertilisation of a panda's egg and its implantation and then between implantation and birth. In some cases, that can take 180 days, and a live birth is not then guaranteed: some pandas will absorb a foetus and the cub can be stillborn or fail to live beyond two weeks. Backed up by analysis at two laboratories, those tests had continued in parallel before the zoo detected Tian Tian producing the breast milk precursor colostrum earlier this month.
Expectations that Tian Tian was pregnant had risen and dipped over the past three months. The zoo first announced her likely pregnancy in late August, predicting she would give birth within a fortnight. But some days later they said that they had misread Tian Tian's hormone results in July and had announced her likely pregnancy two weeks early. Tian Tian has had young before, producing cubs in Beijing in 2009, while Yang Guang has fathered cubs once.
On 9 September, the zoo, advised by panda experts from the China Conservation and Research Centre in Woolong, China, said there was confusing medical evidence. The failed pregnancy is a blow to the zoo's finances: the pandas' arrival in December 2011 helped gate receipts rise by 50% in 2012 after several difficult years. Visitor numbers climbed as her pregnancy was expected and then, in August, spiked with the announcement that Tian Tian might be pregnant.
After reviewing her hormone readings, they realised she had had a second hormone spike suggesting the embryo was implanted later than they had realised. Henry Nicholls, author of a study of captive pandas, Way of the Panda, said the zoo had issued little detailed information but stoked the story by drip-feeding the media and raising expectations among zoo visitors and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland's members.
"They've fallen into the trap of generating huge amounts of publicity, casting the panda's pregnancy in a binary fashion: is she pregnant or isn't she? And that has created difficulties for them," Nicholls said.
"It also misses the much bigger point: it ends up focusing the public's attention on a pregnancy in a single panda. [But] focusing on one panda as if that will achieve a great conservation milestone is misleading. It just simplifies and cheapens the wider conservation message."The animal welfare group Peta, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the loss of this cub was "a sad relief", arguing the best way to support panda conservation was to help protect the wild bears in their natural habitats, not in zoos.
"Had she been born, Tian Tian's cub would have spent her life denied freedom, besieged by a constant onslaught of visitors, separated from her mother, shunted from one zoo to another, artificially inseminated and treated as a commodity," a spokesman said.
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