The Taipei Zoo yesterday said that “Rice Meatball” (肉圓), the temporary nickname of the female panda born on Saturday, is developing healthily.
In the zoo’s daily update on the cub’s status, Chang Shih-hua (張志華), chief of the zoo’s Panda Reproduction Center, said the cub has consumed 75.6cc of milk over the past three days.
The baby panda will be kept in an incubator and raised by zoo staff.
Zookeepers take turns massaging the mother Yuan Yuan’s (圓圓) breasts and extracting colostrum milk.
As the colostrum milk period will soon be over, the zoo will consider mixing powdered milk used for puppies in the milk to meet the cub’s increasing appetite, he said.
Speaking about Yuan Yuan’s condition, Chang said wild pandas do not eat much during the nursing period.
Zoo staff will not prepare big meals for Yuan Yuan, as she is in the nursing stage, and only consumes small amounts of bamboo shoots and honey water.
Chang said the zoo will start giving Yuan Yuan calcium tablets next month and continue to monitor her health.
The zoo provides daily updates and photos of her status in a Web site created for the giant pandas at http://newweb.zoo.gov.tw/panda/news.html.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
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Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
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