Loving Pandas to Death.(in Chinal)(Brief Article)

The first tour buses pull up to China's Wolong Nature Reserve just after lunch. Giddy from the drive past polluted towns and chemical factories, the passengers stagger out into the parking lot and make their way to the four white-tiled souvenir booths. Cigarettes, lighters, backpacks and almost everything else for sale bears the likeness of China's national treasure, the panda. After stocking up on tchotchkes, the tourists move on to the Panda Center to experience the real thing: 43 pandas being raised in concrete pens. Wolong, home to about 10 percent of all China's pandas, is the largest of 33 reserves in the country and the most popular by far.

At Wolong, tourists have ample opportunity to reflect on the plight of this tragic animal. The bears, which live only in China and were put on the endangered-species list in 1984, have been declining in population for decades. A survey in 1974 showing that pandas in the Wolong forest had dropped to an alarmingly low 145 prompted the government to set aside the 500,000-acre reserve. It did little good. A 1986 survey, the most recent, turned up only 72 of the creatures at large. Judging from the paucity of recent citings, scientists suspect that the population in Wolong has dropped below the 1986 level; all told, fewer than 1,000 pandas are left.

Now scientists know why the animals are disappearing. A team led by Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University, compared satellite images of the Wolong taken in 1965, 1974 and 1997 and did some scouting on the ground. Their efforts, reported in the journal Science last week, show that the Wolong forest has deteriorated markedly since the reserve was established in 1975. In the panda habitats, trees have actually been disappearing at a faster rate than before the reserve was created, and quicker even than the forests immediately outside the reserve.

Once the scientists had identified the problem, the cause became obvious: tourism. Chinese authorities say 30,000 tourists visit each year; a local paper says it's more like 140,000 a year. Everybody agrees that tourism has risen markedly since the panda reserve was created. ...