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Panda heads to Tokyo for hot date
Shuan Shuan, one of Mexico's three female giant pandas, embarked on Tuesday on what is hoped will be a voyage of love, bound for a Tokyo zoo where keepers will try to mate her with a Japanese panda stud.
Mexico was the first country outside China to successfully breed pandas in captivity. "This year we decided to change the reproductive strategy given that there have not been any offspring so far," Fernando Gual, general director of Mexico City's zoos, told Reuters at the airport. Shuan Shuan, 16, left Mexico City's Chapultepec Zoo before daybreak in a covered pick-up truck and passed through customs before boarding a commercial Japan Airlines plane. Due to tight food safety regulations, Shuan Shuan will not be eating anything for the duration of the 16-hour flight that stops briefly in Vancouver, Gual said. The panda ate supper and breakfast in Mexico and will have her next meal in Tokyo. Shuan Shuan, weighing a hefty 130 kg (286 lbs), was traveling in a wooden box with two curtained sides which she was trained to enter in weeks prior to her departure. A vet and keeper from the zoo were accompanying her. From the three Mexican-born lady pandas in Chapultepec zoo, Shuan Shuan was chosen to seduce Ling Ling as "she got on best with him" during his last visit, said Rafael Tinajero, the zoo's director. The two bears showed their mutual attraction with "sounds, markings, by urinating, sniffing and looking at each other. There was interest between them," Tinajero said. Breeding pandas in captivity is no easy task. Females go on heat just once a year for just one to two days. Shuan Shuan will have a couple of months to adjust to her new surroundings before she goes on heat around February, Tinajero said. If the mission is accomplished, the baby panda will go back to Mexico with Shuan Shuan. Pandas' gestation period varies between 3 and 5 months, and Gual said Shuan Shuan could be away from Mexico City for up to a year and a half. Only some 800 to 1,000 of the much-loved black and white bears survive in the wild in southern China.
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