Giant pandas have one fertile period throughout the year, lasting just one to three days, and their preference to live alone in their natural habitats means they rarely mate.
Native to southwest China, Beijing has spent decades attempting to boost the population of the iconic bears, creating sprawling reserves across mountain ranges in an effort to save them from extinction.
Giant pandas are infamously hard to breed in captivity, but after years of decline, their numbers in the wild have increased in recent years.
In 2017, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgraded the species from “endangered” to “vulnerable” after their population grew nearly 17% over the previous decade.
It is estimated that around 1,800 pandas remain in the wild, mostly in the mountains of Sichuan, western China. There are around 600 pandas in captivity and Beijing loans some of them to about 20 countries.
