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Yun Zi: From Tiny To Teenager

Posted by Jeroen Jacobs | Date: 2011 11 15 | In: San Diego Zoo

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Michelle Penick, a panda narrator at the San Diego Zoo, wrote this blog post about growing up panda boy Yun Zi.

“Where is the baby panda?” is a question I often get asked by San Diego Zoo visitors. They can hardly believe that the youngest giant panda in our Zoo, Yun Zi, is the 145-pound (66 kilograms) animal that is in the exhibit in front of them!

When pandas first start out life, they are just a few ounces in weight and about the size of a stick of butter. They are fairly helpless and can’t see or hear at that age, but they are quite noisy. This is pretty genius of the cubs to make that much noise so that the 200-plus-pound mother bear knows exactly where the tiny infant is at. Young pandas grow at a very rapid rate and gain independence from their mother at around 18 months of age. Yun Zi has been on his own for quite some time now. He celebrated his second birthday on August 5, and he is now considered a sub-adult by panda research standards or a teenager by our human family standards. Pandas generally live to be 16 to 20 years old in the wild, and in a managed-care environment they can live sometimes into their 30s.

The keepers say that Yun Zi is not only looking more grown up, but he is acting more like a teenager, too. These days, they wonder if the name “Little Dragon,” which also translates as “little monster,” should have been his true name. If you remember, “Little Dragon” was one of the five name choices people could vote for during the final phases of online voting for Yun Zi’s name. But with over 17,500 votes, the people spoke loud and clear, choosing “Yun Zi” or “Son of Cloud.” The name is a great tribute to our mother bear, Bai Yun, or “White Cloud.”

So what has the whirlwind we call Yun Zi been up to? What hasn’t he been up to? He has been running all over his exhibit, turning somersaults, playing in the mud, attacking burlap sacks that the keepers put in the exhibit for him to play with, balancing on his float toys, and all of his other usual hobbies that young Zoo pandas enjoy. Like many teenagers, though, there were a few times in these past few months where his listening skills had room for improvement.

The keepers work with Yun Zi using positive reinforcement training. When Yun Zi does what is asked of him, he is rewarded with a treat. When Yun Zi doesn’t do what is asked of him, he gets ignored for a brief period and then the keepers offer another opportunity to earn treats again later. This is how we get the pandas to go inside their bedrooms so that the keepers can clean. There were a few days this last month where the keepers had to “ask” Yun Zi several times to go in his bedroom. Once I saw them try four times. I asked the keepers about the change in behavior. They said that when Yun Zi is acting more difficult, it is often at a time when they see him going through a growth spurt, just like what seems to happen with human teenagers. If Yun Zi keeps up with all this growing, he will be outweighing his father, Gao Gao, soon.

Source: San Diego Zoo

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