A pair of picky pandas at the Toronto Zoo have been busy racking up a $500,000 food bill for their fussy dinner demands.
But a unique partnership with McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., is now helping the zoo offset some of those costs.
Er Shun and Do Mao are a pair of cuddly giant pandas given on loan to the Toronto Zoo in 2013 as part of a long-term conservation partnership with China.
The playful duo has become a popular local tourist attraction, bringing hundreds of families and young children to the zoo’s state-of-the-art Panda Interpretive Centre.
And while the pandas may spend a few spare minutes playfully interacting with curious visitors, the majority of their days are spent devouring their favourite meal – bamboo.
Zoo officials say both Er Shun and Do Mao can easily spend 16 hours a day munching on the woody tropical grass and scarf down up to 90 pounds of bamboo per day.
Karen Alexander, a worker at the Toronto Zoo, says she refills the pandas’ feeding pens several times a day since the animals are notoriously picky about their food.
“They’ll just reach back and they’ll take a piece and they’ll sniff it and if they like it, they’ll eat it, if they don’t they’ll throw it away – it’s quite comical to watch,” Alexander told CTV News.
Since fresh bamboo is not readily available in Canada, the Toronto Zoo must ship approximately 600 to 900 kilograms of bamboo from a facility in Memphis, Tennessee every week.
The panda’s finicky meals cost the zoo more than half a million dollars a year – that’s almost as much as the food budget for all the animals in zoo combined.
So when Arthur Yeas, manager of McMaster University’s campus greenhouse, heard about the zoo’s astronomical bamboo costs, he got to thinking.
McMaster’s biology department staff use the bamboo plant for their labs and often throw away the samples once they’re done with them.
“We use it for our teaching courses, after that it would go to the compost pile,” Yeas told CTV News.
So the university reached out to the zoo and offered to ship its bamboo to the facility for free.
Even though McMaster’s bamboo is a different variety than the one Er Shun and Do Mao are used to, zoo officials say the pandas seem to like the local delicacy.
“It is a new type of bamboo we found pandas enjoy that we didn’t know that they liked before because they are so particular about their diet,” said Alexander.
While McMaster is only able to ship its bamboo once every few months, the locally grown meal sure hits the spots for these picky eaters.
With a report from CTV’s John Vennavally-Rao
