Giant Pandas Research Station

The San Diego Zoo has had a love affair with giant pandas ever since two of the black-and-white bears came to visit in 1987. After years of red tape and tons of application paperwork, the Zoo and China agreed on a 12-year research loan of two giant pandas, Bai Yun and Shi Shi. A brand-new exhibit area was built for our panda guests, which has since been expanded and renovated and is now called the Giant Panda Research Station. Although we currently have four giant pandas, our facility can comfortably house up to six!

Today our giant pandas enjoy deluxe accommodations with larger exhibit areas and extra vegetation and climbing structures. You'll enjoy the newer exhibit area too, with its winding, elevated viewing paths that give great panda-watching opportunities into the two main enclosures.

Next to the public panda viewing area is the building that houses the Giant Panda Team, made up of the pandas' keepers and researchers who observe and study giant panda behavior in an effort to learn all we can about these endangered bears. Be sure to stroll through the Giant Panda Discovery Center, located nearby. It includes a climb-in panda den, interactive exhibits, and even a chance to find out what pandas sound and smell like!

Fun facts

• The People's Republic of China sent two giant pandas, Basi and Yuan Yuan, to the San Diego Zoo for a 200-day loan in 1987. More than two million people were able to view the pandas during their stay.
• On August 21, 1999, Bai Yun gave birth to Hua Mei, the first giant panda born in North America to survive to adulthood. Millions of people around the world watched Hua Mei grow up via the Zoo's Panda Cam.
• In 1979, the Zoo began working with Chinese zoos to help many of China's endangered animals, including red pandas, takins, and Manchurian cranes.
• A panda narrator is at the panda's main viewing area daily to share the latest news and to answer guests' questions about the "bamboo bears."
• Bamboo is grown on Zoo grounds and at several off-grounds locations to supply the pandas with their daily meals.
• The San Diego Zoo has the largest number of giant pandas in the United States.

Helping giant pandas

Visiting the San Diego Zoo and the Wild Animal Park helps support our studies of wild giant panda populations. Our Applied Animal Ecology Division established its first conservation science program for wild pandas at the Foping Nature Reserve in China in 2006. Over the next three years, the program will be utilizing radiotelemetry to research several important areas to futher our understanding of natural giant panda behavior and ecology. These include: mating strategies and genetic diversity of panda populations, denning ecology, and human disturbance.

Rare Komodo Born at Singapore Zoo

Singapore Zoo has successfully bred the highly-endangered Komodo dragon, officials said on Monday, reporting that the rare baby reptile was in good health.

The 40-centimeter hatchling is the first Komodo dragon born in an Asian zoo outside Indonesia, the native home of the world’s largest lizard species, a spokeswoman said.

In a press statement, assistant director of zoology Biswajit Guha said the hatching of the Komodo dragon, whose gender has not been confirmed, “is one of the most significant moments” for the zoo, one of Singapore’s top attractions.

The breeding of Komodo dragons in captivity “is fraught with difficulties due to incompatible pairings, dearth of experience in egg incubation and over-representation of males in zoos,” he said.

The reptiles are considered one of Indonesia’s national treasures. Komodos can grow up to three meters in length and weigh up to 140 kilograms. They are listed as “vulnerable” in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

Only 3,000 of the poisonous lizards, native to Komodo and a few other islands in eastern Indonesia, remain in the wild, according to another campaign group, The Nature Conservancy, which does fieldwork in the area.

The reptiles live on a diet of large mammals, reptiles and birds, but have been known to attack humans. An Indonesian fisherman was mauled to death by a Komodo dragon in March.

Origin of Komodo Dragon

Dragons may come from the land Down Under. Scientists now find that the world's largest living lizard species, the Komodo dragon, most likely evolved in Australia and dispersed westward to its current home in Indonesia.

In the past, researchers had suggested the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) developed from a smaller ancestor isolated on the Indonesian islands, evolving its large size as a response to lack of competition from other predators or as a specialist hunter of pygmy elephants known as Stegodon.

However, over the past three years, an international team of scientists unearthed numerous fossils from eastern Australia dated from 300,000 years ago to roughly 4 million years ago that they now know belong to the Komodo dragon.

"When we compared these fossils to the bones of present-day Komodo dragons, they were identical," said researcher Scott Hocknull, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Queensland Museum in Australia.

For the last 4 million years, Australia has been home to the world's largest lizards, including the 16-foot-long giant (5 meters) called Megalania, once the world's largest terrestrial lizard but which died out some 40,000 years ago.

"Now we can say Australia was also the birthplace of the three-meter (10 foot) Komodo dragon," Hocknull said.

The researchers said the ancestor of the Komodo dragon most likely evolved in Australia and spread westward, reaching the Indonesian island of Flores by 900,000 years ago. Comparisons between fossils and living Komodo dragons on Flores show that the lizard's body size has remained relatively stable since then.

Further support for this notion of dispersal from Australia comes from the island of Timor, located between Australia and Flores. Three fossil specimens from Timor represent a new, as yet unnamed species of giant monitor lizard, which was larger than the Komodo dragon, although smaller than Megalania. More specimens of this new giant lizard are needed before the species can be formally described.

"There are a lot of things we just simply don't know about this part of the world - Indonesia to Australia," Hocknull told LiveScience. "In recent years this region has thrown up remarkable discoveries - a new species of hominid, the 'Lost World' in New Guinea boasting dozens of new species having never met humans, and now an island chain of giant lizards, including the largest of them all, Megalania from Australia. However, they all went extinct, except the Komodo dragon. The big question now is why? The south-east Asian to Australian region is a hot-spot of new and exciting discoveries."

All these huge lizards were once common in Australasia for more than 3.8 million years, having evolved alongside large mammalian carnivores, such as Thylacoleo, the so-called 'marsupial lion.' The Komodo dragon is the last of these giants, but within the last 2,000 years, their populations have diminished severely, most likely due to humans, and they are now vulnerable to extinction, living now on just a few isolated islands in eastern Indonesia, between Java and Australia.

"Understanding the past history of a species is absolutely fundamental to determining its potential trajectory in the future, its responses to climate change, habitat change and extinction events," Hocknull said. "The Komodo dragon's fossil record shows that it is a resilient species - resilient to major climatic changes throughout its past, surviving extinction events which wiped out contemporary megafauna species."

One question that now pops up is why the Komodo dragon went extinct on Australia while surviving on a few isolated Indonesian isles. Hocknull noted that climate was an unlikely suspect, as "climate impacts species on islands just as much as a big continent like Australia. In Australia there is plenty of habitat which could be conducive to Komodo dragons. If you released them in Australia today they would probably do quite well."

Were humans involved? "We have no evidence for this because the youngest Komodo fossils in Australia are around 300,000 years old, well before humans arrived. So we don't know whether the Komodo dragons in Australia died out before humans arrived or after. So the jury will remain out on this question until a better fossil record is found."

Hocknull noted these islands of lizards are each, in a sense, individual experiments in evolution that shed light not only on the past of these lizards, but potentially also on the future of the world.

"It's a perfect place to see how life adapts and evolves in response to major environmental impacts, like sea level change, climatic changes, catastrophes - tsunamis and volcanic eruptions - plus each island has received modern humans at one time or another," he explained. "What were their impacts and how did species cope? This will be our Rosetta Stone when understanding how species will respond to future climate change."

The scientists will detail their findings on Sept. 30 in the journal PLoS ONE.