Source: Nature: "The Panda Baby"
Funding for the VITAL/Ready to Teach collection was secured through the United States Department of Education under the Ready to Teach Program.
In this video segment from Nature, learn about the wild pandas of the Wolong Conservation Center in China. When the bamboo plant, the pandas’ main source of food, began to die off in the 1980s, the center responded by rescuing starving pandas from the wild. Although the center initially intended to release the pandas once they were nursed back to health, the danger from poachers had become a serious problem. The center had also hoped to breed the pandas; but reproduction in captivity did not occur for many years. To learn about China's panda population, see the "Bamboo Mountain" video segment of this two-part series.
Science, endangered animals, social studies, geography
The following Frame, Focus and Follow-up suggestions are best suited for elementary or middle school students using this video in an English language arts or science lesson. Be sure to modify the questions to meet your students' instructional needs.
What is Frame, Focus and Follow-up?
Frame (ELA) What does it mean to make an inference about a text?
Focus (ELA) When you make an inference, you take the information or clues from the text and add it to what you already know about the topic to figure out something the text doesn’t tell you. What new information do you learn about pandas from watching this video?
Follow Up (ELA) What inferences can you make about pandas in the wild and in captivity based on what you already knew about pandas and what you learned from the video?
Frame (SCI) What do you already know about pandas in the wild and in captivity? How is an animal or organism affected by changes in its environment?
Focus (SCI) How are pandas affected by changes in their environment?
Follow Up (SCI) What predictions can you make about the future existence of pandas in the wild based on what you know and have learned about pandas and efforts made by the Wolong Conservation Center? What predictions might you make about pandas in captivity? On what are you basing your predictions?
Innovative research with captive animals has one all important goal, understanding the needs of their counterparts in the wild. For endangered pandas, that's a world seven thousand miles away, high in the misty bamboo mountains of China.
Pandas are such dedicated bamboo eaters, they've even evolved a pseudo-thumb to grasp the stalks.
But the bamboo forest is shrinking and sometimes large patches flower all at once, seed, and then die. Then there isn't enough for the pandas to eat.
In the 1970's, disaster struck when a mass die-off of bamboo occurred. Many pandas died.
But when another bamboo die-off began in the 1980's, the Chinese were ready. They brought the starving pandas down from the mountains and into captivity.
Many came here, to the Wolong Conservation Center for Giant Pandas.
This is one of China's two major panda research centers.
At first, Wolong keepers nursed the pandas back to health in the hopes of returning them to the wild. They added milk and bread to their diet because even here, keepers can't gather enough bamboo to sustain the pandas. Each one can eat around fifty pounds of bamboo a day.
So, the Chinese made a kind of bamboo helper -- by mixing ground-up bamboo with rice, corn, vitamins and minerals.
The resulting flour is baked into a nutritious bread.
The pandas revived and the Chinese hoped to start a breeding program. But years went by without a single birth. What's more, poaching had become a serious problem.
This crippled animal lost its paw in a poacher's snare. Wolong's pandas weren't going back into the wild.
Academic standards correlations on Teachers' Domain use the Achievement Standards Network (ASN) database of state and national standards, provided to NSDL projects courtesy of JES & Co.
We assign reference terms to each statement within a standards document and to each media resource, and correlations are based upon matches of these terms for a given grade band. If a particular standards document of interest to you is not displayed yet, it most likely has not yet been processed by ASN or by Teachers' Domain. We will be adding social studies and arts correlations over the coming year, and also will be increasing the specificity of alignment.