Following last month’s 7.9 magnitude earthquake, Chinese officials originally reported that all 86 of the giant pandas at the Wolong Nature Reserve were safe. They were wrong.

A week after the May 12 quake, Wolong keepers realized that three of the bears were missing. The keepers hoped the bears had escaped from their enclosures. But last week, they discovered the body of one of them — a nine-year-old panda named Mao Mao. She was crushed when the walls of her enclosure collapsed.

Over at the San Diego Zoo Blog, Ron Swaisgood, co-head of the San Diego Zoo’s Giant Panda Conservation Unit, shares some of his memories caring for Mao Mao at Wolong back in 2000:

Mao Mao and I go way back to 2000 when she was rescued from the wild by local farmers. She arrived at Wolong, shy and timid, barking anxiously every time she saw someone walk by. She settled in during the coming days and weeks and I became quite enamored with her. She had a unique personality and was always a bit wilder than the others, so I dubbed her “Wild Thing.”

She became a star breeder, producing five cubs over the next three seasons. Our research assistant, Jennifer Keating, witnessed her mating again this spring, so sadly she may have been pregnant as well. Because she was unrelated to the other pandas at the center, she was very valuable genetically. Read more…

In the panda world, Mao Mao was quite a prolific breeder. Getting pandas to breed successfully in captivity has proven a frustrating challenge to zookeepers. In many cases, romance fails to spark between viable panda pairs and they refuse to mate. Or, when females become pregnant, their cubs often die within days of being born.

In NATURE’s “The Panda Baby,” the San Diego Zoo’s Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species (CRES) got a chance to take a crack at the problem when Chinese scientists loaned the zoo a pair of the animals for 12 years. Find out if the experts succeeded.