Panda Updates – Friday, August 25

Happy 20th birthday, Lun Lun! We hope everyone was able to tune in to see our favorite mama bear enjoying her birthday surprises earlier this afternoon.

In cub news, it’s official – the girls have reached another milestone! They now have their own allotment of leafeater biscuits and a small amount of sweet potato. This is so they stop stealing as many of Mom’s biscuits as they have been lately. The girls have never had sweet potato, so it will take a while for them to like it. Giant pandas are food neophobic, which is fancy talk for “I don’t like new foods.” The reason we’re not using apple or banana right now is so that Lun won’t steal their food as much, either! All of our cubs have started out on their own allotment of sweet potato, with a bit of apple and banana thrown in as a treat. I’m sure these girls will take to the yummy sweet potatoes just as their older siblings did. If you look carefully at the picture of the girls’ containers, you’ll notice that we’re reusing Mei Lun’s and Mei Huan’s containers! You can kind of see a “ML” and “MH” underneath the new initials. They are still in good shape, so why not?