Here they come! Image via Global News
The public will have their first glimpse of Er Shun and Da Mao today, two giant pandas on loan from China for five years at the Toronto Zoo. The pandas, the first to be hosted in Canada in almost 20 years, will be sitting pretty in the Eurasia section, where they’ll be spending 10-16 hours a day eating 93 to 141 pounds of bamboo and defecating up to 40 times daily, depending on their reading material.
Keepers are hoping that Er Shun and Da Mao will breed, which will most likely keep them in Toronto instead of going to Calgary at the end of their five-year stay. The giant panda population is perilously low, with only 1,600 giant pandas living in the wild, most of them in China’s Yangtze River Basin, and a further 300 living in captivity.
Here’s hoping one of them sneezes:
____
Vidal Wu is an intern at Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @vidalwuu.
oFor more, follow us on Twitter at @TorontoStandard, and subscribe to our newsletter.