A Chinese expert on giant panda breeding will visit Taipei Zoo on Sunday to offer advice on breeding the two giant pandas given by China last year.
Li Chongxi (李崇禧), deputy secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Sichuan Provincial Committee, who is heading a delegation promoting trade and economic exchanges, said yesterday that Zhang Hemin (張和民), director of the Wolong Giant Panda Protection Research Center of China, will visit the zoo.
Li said the two pandas were selected based on their ability to breed.
Expressing the hope that the pandas will soon have a cub, Li said he invited Zhang to visit Taiwan to help with panda reproduction efforts because giant pandas, especially those in captivity, have low libido.
Given Zhang’s experience in panda research and his ability to help female giant pandas get pregnant and give birth, Li said that he believes Zhang would be able to help the Taipei Zoo pair reproduce.
Captive pandas usually reach sexual maturity at the age of five-and-a-half, and therefore it is too early for Taipei’s pandas to mate since they were born in 2004.
Yuan Yuan went into heat for the first time last year in China, but Tuan Tuan has yet to show interest, Zhang said.
He said giant pandas become sexually mature at different ages, but he suggested that their keepers should try to arouse the two pandas’ sexual instincts, enhance their natural mating ability and improve their reproductive capacity.
If those steps did not work, they could then try artificial insemination.
“It should not be a problem to have Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan produce offspring,” Zhang said, adding he was confident that his research center could help with panda breeding.
Li also said yesterday that if Yuan Yuan did give birth in Taipei, the cubs would not be sent back to China.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater