China's restart of panda diplomacy: Zoos in the USA can hope for new bears - and Munich too?. Only four pandas still live in the Atlanta Zoo and will fly to China in 2024.
China's first panda census counted just over 1,100 bears in the 1980s. Today, according to Chinese data, there are around 1,900 again. The animals rarely mate in the wild, the females are only fertile for a few days each year. This means that panda pairs must be closely related in order to ensure genetic diversity in the population.