Hong Kong recently celebrated the birth of twin giant pandas. What makes this occasion so unusual is the mother’s age. The panda Ying Ying gave birth a day before she turned 19, the equivalent of 57 human years. It makes her the oldest giant panda on record to give birth for the first time.
Ying Ying and her partner, Le Le, are the second pair of pandas that Beijing gifted to the city in 2007. The two repeatedly failed to conceive for over a decade despite several rounds of natural mating and an artificial insemination procedure in 2023. Ying Ying went through a miscarriage as well. The first pair of gifted pandas, An An and Jia Jia, died without reproducing.
Ying Ying and Le Le successfully mated naturally in March at Ocean Park, where they live. Fortunately, their cubs came out healthy. The female cub was born first, weighing 122 g, while her brother followed at 112 g. According to Ocean Park, the panda cubs will need time to stabilize as they are currently very fragile. As a result, both cubs are being taken care of by an animal care team and other experts. The public is very excited about this development, and a photo of the twins on Facebook has already received over a thousand congratulatory messages.
China has worked hard over the years to reverse the decline of the giant panda population. These efforts have paid off, with the species upgraded from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2017.