Rachel Sadon
Mei Xiang (Photo via National Zoo)
You thought sonogram profile pictures were bad? The National Zoo has taken documenting the (panda) baby making process to a whole new level.
Now that Bao Bao has moved out of the house, zookeepers are hoping that Mei Xang can get pregnant again. But they aren’t going to rely on the vagaries of panda sex, or even Tian Tian’s artificially inseminated sperm. The National Zoo went back to China to get frozen semen from a different, better panda.
Mei Xang’s pregnancy saga begins on Instagram this time, with a series of posts (tagged #pandastory and #instascience) tracking the shipment of panda sperm from a Chinese cryopreservation bank.
“What do you do with something as valuable as semen from an endangered species,” the Zoo asks and answers in one post. “Bank it, obvi.”
The specimen was taken from Hui Hui, a 9-year-old panda who lives at the China Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda in Wolong, Sichuan Province. He was chosen by a yenta scientist who specializes in making the best genetic breeding matches for giant pandas.
“This is the first time we have imported semen from China for panda breeding,” Dennis Kelly, director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, said in a release.
Caitlin Burrell, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, went out to retrieve the frozen sperm and then toted it back to the zoo. They hope to artificially inseminate Mei Xang with it in the tiny window for breeding—she will go into estrus for between 24 to 72 hours, about 45 to 50 days after she separated from Bao Bao, according to the zoo.
In related news, you can apparently take frozen semen as a carry-on.
