“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 at the conservation center, told Xinhua.

At 31, Pan Pan was thought to be the world’s oldest male panda. He died Wednesday at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency in China. Pandas in the wild generally live to be about 20, but often survive longer in captivity.

Pan Pan, a giant panda whose virility helped spawn an entire generation of the notoriously difficult-to-breed animals, died this week at a conservation center in China’s Sichuan province.


Pandas International, a Colorado-based charity that supports conservation efforts, mourned the loss of Pan Pan in a blog post that described a visit to China in July to celebrate his 31st birthday.

“He was living a quiet, comfortable life in the geriatric wing of the Dujiangyan Giant Panda Base where he was given the very best of care,” it said. “He fought a brave battle against cancer but ultimately it won.”

Pan Pan was born in the wild in 1985 and taken into captivity shortly after, according to the BBC. As part of a breeding program, he was especially successful at impregnating female pandas, a notoriously difficult feat for a species that is fertile for only two or three days each year. A spokesman for the panda conservation center in Sichuan told CNN that Pan Pan had “a strong physique” in his youth, which apparently helped when it came to impregnating female pandas.

“Pan Pan was really fast and agile when he was young,” the spokesman said.

Xinhua reported that Pan Pan had more than 130 descendants, and that his offspring and their cubs accounted for nearly a quarter of the more than 420 captive pandas alive worldwide today.


His descendants are found in zoos around the world. He sired Bai Yun, the giant panda who has lived at the San Diego Zoo since 1996, and he was the grandfather of Tai Shan, who in 2005 became the first surviving panda cub born in captivity at the National Zoo in Washington.

In September, the International Union for Conservation of Nature removed pandas from its “endangered” list, saying that efforts by the Chinese government to preserve their native habitat had been successful. They are now designated as “vulnerable,” by the organization, which found an estimated 1,864 giant pandas in the wild, not counting young cubs under the age of 18 months.

China’s State Forestry Administration disputed the designation and told the Associated Press that “giant pandas could still suffer irreversible loss” if conservation efforts were relaxed.