Bamboo lovers lane to hook up China's lonely pandas

CHENGDU, China (Reuters Life!) - Ensuring the survival of your species is a lot of pressure to put on a first date.

But that's the stark reality facing China's endangered wild pandas, say the experts who are building the first bamboo-filled "dating and mating lane" to stop the solitary creatures nose-diving into extinction in mountainous Sichuan Province.

Artificial breeding and high-tech remedies for the shrinking panda population are a small industry in China but these have done little for the love lives of creatures in the wild, said Professor Yin Kaipu of the Chengdu Institute of Biology.

For the 600 pandas in the Minshan mountain range running north from Sichuan into Gansu Province, the world's largest wild population, meeting new mates is all but impossible due to decades of urban sprawl and development.

Split into two groups by an inter-county highway constructed in 1958, the notoriously shy creatures' prospects of "freely exchanging DNA" were further dampened 10 years ago by a hydroelectric project that raised the water-table, making swollen rivers in the south impassable, Yin said.

"Pandas don't like cars. They run away. But the river may be worse than the road, because there are only a few cars," he explained in his office in Chengdu.

"In the spring the pandas want to find a mate but they can't cross the river. In the south part, the pandas cannot communicate with each other, because the landscape is fragmented. There are four protected reserves separated by rivers".

The bamboo-filled panda corridor that opened this year to link the estimated 539 individuals in the north with the 42 in the south is the only way to save the dwindling southern population and avoid inbreeding the north, said Yin.

NO PANDA PORN

The 25-km (15.5 miles) long and 2 km wide corridor runs along high mountain ridges and above the Minjiang and Fujiang Rivers.

The corridor's back-to-basics approach is a far cry from the "panda porn" sex education movies and electrified rectal probes used to harvest semen at breeding centers that logged a record 34 captive births last year.

Yin and his team of five assistants are weeding out the thorny shrubs and uprooting the pine trees that cover the corridor to replant the ridges with the panda's favorite, and only food: arrow bamboo.

Then, they hope, nature will take its course.

If the first corridor works, others will be built in a last ditch attempt to stop other wild populations plummeting into extinction because of habitat fragmentation.

Scattered over six mountain ranges in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces, 1,100 of China's estimated 1,600 wild giant pandas live in 30 fragmented areas, 20 of which contain less than 10 effective mature adults. Experts say that isolated populations need at least 50 mature pandas to maintain genetic variability.

Isolated pockets of less than 10 individuals generally die out within a few years. And all are at high risk of starvation if they cannot escape to new areas when climate changes, or natural ecological problems that wipe out their food source, occur.

Protecting panda habitat could have the added bonus of benefiting other endangered species like the Asiatic black bear and the golden monkey, who scientists anticipate will also make use of the corridor.

"To protect these species the most important thing is to restore the habitat, not just artificial breeding", Kaipu said.

With peace, quiet and a means to hook up, only one aspect of the honeytrap is still missing: food.

"No pandas have been seen on the corridor yet," Kaipu said. "Some have been seen very near it. They're waiting for bamboo."