00:26 Oldest Panda was a Prolific Father Pan Pan the Panda has passed on. He was a prolific father, with more than 130 offspring.

At a Glance Pan Pan died at age 31, or roughly 100 human years.

Pan Pan earned the moniker "Panda Grandpa" through the 130-some descendents he produced during his lifetime. Pan Pan, the world’s oldest captive male panda, died on Friday morning at age 31, Chinese conservation officials said.

The average lifespan for a wild panda is just about 20 years, although captive pandas can typically live longer. Still, Pan Pan’s lifespan was remarkable.

"Pan Pan was the equivalent to about 100 human years, but he had been living with cancer and his health had deteriorated in the past three days," Tan Chengbin, a keeper with the Dujiangyan base of the China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Panda, told Xinhua. "He had lost consciousness."

This has been a rough year for the world’s oldest pandas. Jia Jia, once the world’s oldest female panda at age 38, died in October.

“While all Giant Pandas are very special, Pan Pan will always hold a special place in my heart," Pandas Internatioal wrote in a touching tribute to the panda. "You made such a difference in the world Precious Pan Pan and you touched my life and my heart forever. Rest well sweet Pan Pan. The world misses you and so do I.”

Despite his death, Pan Pan will live on, literally. The geriatric panda earned the nickname “Panda Grandpa” through 31 years of reproductive service, directly producing 30 offspring, and in turn, 130 descendants. Pan Pan’s prolific reproductive work made him responsible for 25 percent of the world’s 422 captive pandas, Xinhua notes.

And reproducing in captivity is no small task. A variety of complicating factors make captive panda births and survival rare , conservation group Pandas International notes.

Panda reproduction in the wild is a slow process, too. Pair that with poaching and a decline in natural habitat, and you've got a recipe for extinction.

But in recent years, habitat conservation efforts by the Chinese government, coupled with a decline in poaching, have made a huge difference for wild giant pandas. An estimated 1,864 pandas are now believed to live in the wild, 2,060 if cubs are included in those figures. As National Geographic reports, that's a 16 percent increase in the panda population from 2003 to 2016.

The population increase prompted the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to upgrade the panda’s status from endangered to vulnerable on the organization’s red list -- the authority on the estimated population of all the world’s living things -- earlier this year.

But the organization cautions that the growth in population in recent years comes with one big caveat: Climate change is expected to destroy more than 35 percent of giant panda’s habitat in the coming decades, meaning the panda could flirt with extinction for years to come.

That just makes Pan Pan's legacy all the more important for keeping the species afloat.