Flying back from California to D.C., JoGayle Howard carried into the San Diego airport a two-foot-tall tank that looked like a metal bomb. Inside, the dry ice gave off a swirl of what looked like smoke.
Howard had already enlisted the help of Homeland Security officials, who ushered her menacing-looking container into the hands of special screeners, lest the X-ray machine's radiation destroy its cargo.
By the time she boarded her red-eye flight, flight attendants were cooing over the container, wrapping it in blankets and pillows and asking that any future babies be named after them. Such is the attention to detail afforded by airline industry workers when they know you've just collected and are transporting one of the most valuable commodities in the zoo world:
Frozen panda semen.
"The sperm went first-class," Howard, a National Zoo vet, noted wryly. "I did not."
The sperm flown with such fanfare to Washington last month was for the sole purpose of creating another cub. After meticulous study by animal geneticists, a giant panda from San Diego, with beckoning eyes and unquestioned virility, was deemed the perfect donor for an offspring with the National Zoo's Mei Xiang.
In the days since Howard's return, zoo staffers have been watching Mei Xiang's hormone levels and looking for the prime moment at which to artificially inseminate her. That necessitates swabbing her urine from the floor. "When she wakes up in the morning, she normally pees, and we take that sample," Howard said.
Two years ago, artificial insemination using sperm from Tian Tian, Mei Xiang's male partner at the zoo, resulted in the birth of Tai Shan.
This time, if all goes as planned, the father will be the hearty Gao Gao (pronounced Gow Gow), pride of the San Diego Zoo, a giant panda whose promotional glossies -- and isn't that so very, very SoCal? -- show him to possess the liquid eyes of a Johnny Depp and the sultry mystery of an Antonio Banderas.
Tian Tian, in comparison, is kind of a Danny DeVito meets Michael Dukakis, a somewhat dopey but sweetly earnest guy who seems to inhabit the wonky culture of his adopted Washington home. Even in Pandaland, it appears, hunky heartthrobs win.
Yet it's not masculine prowess that has made the National Zoo go ga-ga for Gao Gao. It is not even that Gao Gao, whose name means "Big Big," effortlessly impregnated the San Diego Zoo's female panda, Bai Yun. The giant pandas of San Diego now live in nuclear-familial bliss, with Gao Gao and Bai Yun the parents of a boy and a girl.
Gao Gao’s genetic line
No, all of that is beside the point. For National Zoo officials like Howard, a theriogenologist (big word; she unfurls it effortlessly but does have to pause while spelling it) whose expertise is the reproductive biology of endangered species, the thrill of uniting the Washington gal with the California guy comes down to one thing: Gao Gao's genetic line.
Tian Tian comes from good breeders: His father and siblings have spread their DNA through the world's panda population. Gao Gao, though, appears to be the cream of his family's crop. His family line, Howard said, "is not well represented."
This came to light last year at a giant panda breeding conference in Thailand, when National Zoo geneticist John Ballou -- who is to endangered species matchups what eHarmony is to the American dating scene -- put Gao Gao near the top of a 200-panda-long list of global breeding recommendations. Zookeepers in San Diego and Washington immediately saw possibility.
This is not to say, Howard quickly pointed out, that such cross-country hoopla means Gao Gao is "more virile." It just means, she said gently, that Gao Gao's "lineage has never crossed with our females."
Ultrasound will tell
If all goes as carefully planned, their lineages should cross sometime soon. Zoo officials have two days -- the equivalent of one swift weekend during the entirety of 2007 -- in which to get this right. Mei Xiang should hit her peak fertility sometime this month, or at some point in April, or maybe in May. At least before June.
At which point they'll begin Phase II: trying to discern whether it worked.
Pandas' "hormones look the same whether they're pregnant or not pregnant," Howard said, which means biologists must spread blue goo across Mei Xiang's furry belly and turn on the ultrasound machine to start looking for their next Baby Butterstick.