Vanessa's Journal

Feb. 3

The news from the trapping team is that the golden monkeys are back! They are in their usual rare form and singing up a storm. I’m sure they are roaming in search of areas with less snow at this point in the winter. I’ll be going to check traps the day after tomorrow, so I hope I get a chance to see them again. 

On my end of things, there isn’t too much to report. I’ve just been doing more reading of my various texts. The Giant Pandas of Wolong is coming along. The parts that fascinate me the most are those that talk about interactions among neighboring individuals. They discuss evidence that different individuals moved to a different part of their range at the same time. The two main cases they bring up are a male monitoring a female during the mating season from a distance and also an intriguing close relationship between two neighboring sub-adults who often seemed to stay within a close 200 m of one another. The neighbors likely did not communicate directly but rather by scent, what is presumed the main form of communication in pandas. Oftentimes I think that we get caught up in the label of “solitary” that scientists have placed on giant pandas.  But it is important to remember that when an animal behaviorist uses the term “solitary,” it does not necessarily mean “no meaningful relationships with other individuals.” It means that the individuals maintain their complex societies mostly by communicating with one another from a distance. 

I’m also fascinated by anecdotal evidence that one adult female in their study could have adopted an infant panda that was not her own. There is little to no evidence of adoption in pandas, but it sometimes happens in other animals. Usually it is when a female loses a baby of her own but is still lactating and then happens upon an abandoned young.  In this case, a female giant panda named Zhen was in fact believed to have lost her baby that year for unknown reasons, yet she was spotted with an older infant (much too old to be hers) soon after. It was believed that this infant’s mother was killed by poachers. Zhen later entered a trap and the researchers noted that she was lactating, which would be impossible if she had not been accompanying an infant.  There are many unknowns in this case and there was no solid evidence that adoption had occurred, but it is nonetheless fascinating to entertain the possibility.