The Chinese know how to breed the popular bears. Now they're releasing them into the wild, where the animals and their habitat face risks.

Ye Ye, a 16-year-old giant panda, lounges in a wild enclosure at a conservation center in Wolong Nature Reserve. Her name, whose characters represent Japan and China, celebrates the friendship between the two nations. Ye Ye’s cub Hua Yan (Pretty Girl) is being trained for release into the wild.

I crouch down low in the grass to get a closer look at the animal lurching toward me. She’s about four months old, the size of a soccer ball, slightly bug-eyed, and no doubt soft and fragrant as a puppy. The urge to scoop her up and squeeze her is overwhelming.

That adorability is one reason the giant panda is an international sensation as well as a cultural icon, an economic gold mine, and a source of national pride in China—the only country in which these Asian bears still survive. Now the whole world is watching China’s dogged attempt to keep pandas on the map—which in some ways has been an unprecedented success.

Like many endangered species, giant pandas have declined as a growing human population has grabbed wild lands for human uses. That problem hasn’t gone away since the species was labeled endangered in 1990. But the Chinese have spent the past quarter century perfecting breeding methods and building a captive population hundreds strong—and leveraging it to bring in millions of tourist dollars.

It’s one thing to raise animals in captivity before adoring crowds and another to ensure a species’ survival in nature. Whatever comes next in this bear’s conservation may decide whether the giant panda becomes a relic behind bars or roams free in the wild.

Giant pandas are masters of adaptation. “We humans are used to changing the environment to suit our needs,” says Zhang Hemin, director of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, which oversees three panda bases: Bifengxia, Dujiangyan, and Wolong. “The difference is that pandas changed themselves to suit the environment.”Time and necessity have fine-tuned pandas to thrive in a very specific habitat. Still built like their carnivorous kin, these bears—and they are true bears, according to their DNA—have the canine teeth to tear flesh and the enzymes to digest meat. Because of gaps in the fossil record, exactly when they diverged from other bears isn’t clear. A jaw from Spain puts an early panda relative at 11.6 million years old, while DNA evidence suggests 18 million. And bones from a cave in China indicate giant pandas as we know them are at least two million years old.The exact timing and reason for pandas going vegetarian is debated, but those eons of adaptations leave modern pandas with some unique tools, including flat molars for crushing and a thumblike appendage, an extension of the wrist bone, helpful for handling bamboo. Interestingly, they lack any special gut microbes to break down the bamboo that has become 99 percent of their food—one reason they are relatively low-energy animals. To derive enough nutrients, pandas eat 20 to 40 pounds of plant material a day.

To satisfy their love for particular flora that grows best beneath big, old trees with hidey-holes for stashing cubs, pandas can’t live just anywhere. But that specialization is now working against them. The species used to range across southern and eastern China and northern Myanmar and Vietnam. Now they’re found in patchy mountain habitat only in China, in perhaps one percent of their historic range.

How many wild pandas are out there? Researchers have been trying to count them since the 1970s, when it is thought there were roughly 2,500 animals. That dropped dramatically in the 1980s, in part because of a periodic natural die-off of bamboo. (Normally pandas can survive such natural ecological events by shifting to more fruitful habitat, but if there’s nowhere to move, they’ll starve.)

The Chinese government’s most recent survey, from 2014, reported 1,864 in the wild, 17 percent more than in 2003. But Marc Brody, a National Geographic grantee who founded the conservation nonprofit Panda Mountain, warns that it’s tough to trust any specific figures. “We may just be getting better at counting pandas,” he says. Also, it’s difficult to compare numbers across the decades because ranges and survey methods have varied; today they include DNA analysis of panda poo.

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