Panda Updates – Wednesday, August 22

There has been an update in the ongoing sweet potato saga! I don’t know if everyone else cares about this as much as we do, but weighing the twins is a lot easier when we can set up the scale for both of the twins at once. This gives us more time to focus on the fun things, like enrichment or selecting the best pieces of bamboo based on how the giant pandas are eating that day.

Previously on The Sweet Potato Saga (as it is now its own soap opera, complete with twins! Although neither seems to be the evil twin…), Xi Lun disliked sweet potato, so we placed leafeater biscuits for her and sweet potato for Ya Lun on the scale. We shifted them onto the scale in that order, with Xi Lun eating her biscuits and moving off the scale to grab bamboo, and then Ya Lun coming into the scale room and getting on the platform to eat her sweet potato. All was fine until Xi Lun suddenly, after months of ignoring the sweet potato, took a liking to it! This meant that we would have to shift the twins around in the building a lot more in order to have them in the scale room at separate times and give us a chance to reset the platform with reinforcement after shifting the first twin out. All that time that could be spent giving Yang Yang biscuits or working on special enrichment, tossed away on the breeze!

Thankfully, just as with every good soap opera, there has been a new twist! It turns out that Xi Lun is unsurprisingly a little bit of a princess. She prefers her sweet potato chopped into small pieces, and will ignore it if it’s too large. Ya Lun, however, is happy to plunk down and nibble on a large chunk of sweet potato. This allows us to go back to our former more efficient method of weighing the twins, at least until Xi Lun changes her mind again!

(dramatic voice) Next time on The Sweet Potato Saga…hopefully everything stays the same!
Michelle E.
Keeper II, Mammals