Pandas finally mate in Hong Kong zoo shuttered over coronavirus
The coronavirus lockdown is just what the love doctor ordered for a pair of pandas in China.
The randy twosome — Ying Ying and Le Le — were caught on camera canoodling Monday in Ocean Park, a Hong Kong zoo where visitors — and their prying eyes — are now barred because of the bug, reports said.
“Maybe when you aren’t being stared at by tens of thousands of hairless apes every day, you find your mojo again,” one observer remarked.
The zoo has tried for over a decade to get the pair to conceive, and Michael Boos, executive director of the park’s zoological operations and conservation, cheered the “exciting” breakthrough.
“The chance of pregnancy via natural mating is higher than by artificial insemination,” he noted, the South China Morning Post reported.
Ying Ying could be showing as early as late June, Boos said.
“It gives us some hope when Hong Kong is clouded with so much negative news,” added lawmaker Yiu Si-wing told the outlet.
Both pandas are 14 years old — beyond their sexual prime.
The zoo is $6 billion dollars in the red and closed for over two months because of the coronavirus, the paper reported.
With less than 2,000 in the wild and 400 in captivity, pandas are vulnerable to extinction; they are very difficult to mate in captivity.