Bao Li is currently in rut\u2014the period when male giant pandas ready themselves for breeding. Typically, it lasts from November to May. During this time, if he catches a glimpse of Qing Bao, he will vocalize and try to grab her attention.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Outside of breeding season, Qing Bao usually doesn\u2019t respond. But she\u2019s not deliberately ghosting him. Female giant pandas\u2019 interest in males is driven by their hormones, which only ramp up for a few consecutive weeks out of the entire year. And estrus\u2014the window when female giant pandas are able to conceive a cub\u2014is extremely short, lasting only 48-to-72 hours.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Last year, Qing Bao experienced her first estrus cycle<\/a> in March and April, followed by her first pseudopregnancy<\/a> in August and September. This year, on Feb. 16, we noticed Qing Bao was starting to show some physiological changes in her reproductive area\u2014a key indicator that breeding season was right around the corner.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the next several weeks, we saw changes in her behavior, too. Initially, Qing Bao went about her normal routine of eat, sleep, play and repeat. But by mid-March, she spent a lot of time wandering around her habitat and scent marking.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bao Li is currently in rut\u2014the period when male giant pandas ready themselves for breeding. Typically, it lasts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[85,46,141,386],"class_list":["post-374661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}