Study On The Activity Pattern Of Giant Panda After Released Into Xiaoxiangling Mountains

Translocation is believed to be one of the important methods to protect small and isolated populations of wildlife from local extinction.Nevertheless,many efforts ended with failure,indicating that translocation is still under high risk in population conservation.Dynamic monitoring of the behavior of the individuals after release allows not only enhancing knowledge of their acclimation process to the novel surrounding but also timely rescue measures or termination of the release procedure when necessary,thereby reducing the risk of death of released animals.However,it is difficult to monitor the behavior of individuals after translocation by routine methods,especially for the species that inhabitant in forest.In order to grain the knowledge on the acclimation process of giant pandas after release,we analyzed the behavior pattern of six captive-bred and one rescued giant pandas that were released in Liziping national nature reserve,with the data from GPS collars.Base on the changes in spatial utilization pattern,the acclimation process of survived captive-bred giant pandas after reintroduction can be divided into four phases: initial movement phase,initial stable phase,exploration phase,and complete adaptation phase.The rescued giant panda adapted to the surrounding much faster without experienced the first three phases as the captive-bred did.Before the exploration phase,the captive-bred individuals mainly inhabited near the release site,whereas the rescue one moved far away from the release site immediately after release.The rescued giant panda tended to visit the areas that it prefers to frequently,while the captive-bred individuals spent more time to explore new patches.In addition,individuals who were released together at the same site showed a relative high rate of overlap following release.All the survived captive-bred individuals experienced an increase in daily activity level after release.The daily activity level of the dead individual was significantly lower than that of the survived ones and experienced a rapid decrease.The undulation of the daily activity level of the giant pandas that were release together was stronger than that of the others.Survived individuals preferred to be diurnal,while the dead ones were nocturnal.We find that daily activity level and daily rhythm can be used as effective indicator to estimate whether the released giant pandas are able to adapt to the environment after release.Combined with the results,we come to the following conclusions.First of all,after pre-release training,although the captive-bred giant pandas can adapt to the wild environment after release,their adaptability is not as good as that of the rescued individuals.Secondly,the giant pandas that are release together may affect the acclimation process of each other,and result in the failure of translocation.At last,immediate release and delayed release had little effect on the adaptation process of giant pandas after release.This study is important for understanding the adaptation process of giant pandas after reintroduction and can be used to optimize the translocation project of giant pandas in the future.