The truth about panda sex | Lucy Cooke | Big Think

The truth about panda sex

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We humans love to hear about how utterly useless pandas are at sex. 'They won't breed to save their species!' Except that's not true at all, says zoologist Lucy Cooke.

Wild pandas are extremely virile — their sperm is 10 to 100 times more dense than human sperm — and pandas in the wild have been observed having sex 40 times in a single afternoon.

In this comprehensive and fascinating talk, Cooke explains the panda mating ritual ("a sort of urinary Olympics"), why captive breeding has created a second kind of panda that struggles to survive in the wild, and she reveals what humans can really do help: stop micromanaging pandas' sex lives.

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LUCY COOKE:

Lucy Cooke is a National Geographic Explorer with a Masters in zoology from Oxford University (where she was taught by Richard Dawkins). She loves travel and adventure and has a soft spot for some of the planet's strangest and most misunderstood animals.

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TRANSCRIPT:

LUCY COOKE: So I think inaccurate portraits of animals can lead to ineffective conservation plans. For example, take the panda. So here is an animal that is hugely adored and hugely anthropomorphized. Pandas are basically cute crack. They trigger our reward centers into releasing chemicals that make us want to nurture, because the panda looks a little bit like a toddler stumbling around, so it fires off this instinct in us — so we're kind of helpless not to love it. And we have infantilized pandas, we think that they are completely helpless and they can't survive without our intervention. And this is, I think, complete rubbish.

There are two pandas, you see. There is the wild panda, which is a secret stud with a taste for flesh and beautifully evolved to survive in its unique environment. Then there is a captive panda. Now, the captive panda we all are very familiar with as a creature which doesn't really like to reproduce, it's a pretty helpless creature.

But that's because animals in captivity — it's incredibly hard to get animals in captivity to breed. Animals have a wide range of environmental and behavioral cues that are necessary in order to get them in the mood — it's the animal equivalent of a glass of wine and a bit of Barry White. And if you don't get that right, if you don't know what that is, then it's going to be very hard to get them to reproduce in captivity. In the case of pandas, pandas actually occupy a surprisingly large range, and although they are quite solitary as creatures, they advertise their availability, as it were, on these trees that act as kind of notice boards. They're a bit like panda Tinder, if you like. The female, when she comes into eustrus, which is, as we know, a very narrow window, she will rub herself and her scent against one of these message-board trees and then that will draw males in to also leave their message to sort of say, "Hey what about me?" and leave their advert.

Now, their advert that they leave is a scented advert, it's included in their urine. So the females like males that can squirt their urine the highest up a tree. So males engage in what can only be described as a sort of urinary Olympics in order to squirt their pee as high up the tree as possible. And the scientific paper that exposed this has got this fantastic terminology in it, that there are a plethora of positions that the panda adopts from squat to leg kick to even handstand in order to get their pee highest up the tree. And then the female will then choose which male she wants. Now it's a very different situation from being in a zoo, where two pandas are plonked together in a concrete environment and expected to reproduce. And of course that fails. So we then have this opinion and it becomes very popular, we love to read about how useless pandas are at sex. I think it makes us feel better about ourselves, quite frankly. I think it helps us feel superior, actually.

And so those stories are incredibly popular, and so we have this idea that there's this bear that is somehow hopeless in this evolutionary mishap that, unless we micromanage its life, isn't going to survive. When in actual fact in the wild the panda is doing just fine. They find mates and when they do find mates they have been observed having sex up to 40 times in a single afternoon. So the female panda's narrow window of fertility, which is always ridiculed as being this sort of problem, might actually just be a means of controlling the p...

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