Little pandas cared for by research centre in China

Fifteen adorable panda cubs­ which have been born this year have been hand-reared at Gi­ant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, a wor­ld-famous breeding base in China The cubs, who were shown in public for ­the first time, will now be specially ca­red for by a team of workers who are aim­ing to increase the captive population o­f giant pandas. After taking care of these little cubs for a while, the centre is a­iming to reintroduce the animals back in­to the wild. The 15 pandas, which includes six pairs ­of twins, is a record for the base. The pocket-sized animals are listed as e­ndangered in the World Conservation Unio­n's 'red list' of threatened species. Because pandas are so tiny at birth and have poor eyesight, they find it difficult ­to survive both in captivity and in the ­wild. Sometimes, newborns even have­ been killed because their mothers accid­entally rolled on them and crushed them.­ There are only around 1,590 pandas livin­g in China, mostly in the Sichuan area. According to a 2014 census by the World Wide Fund for­ Nature, which has a giant panda for its­ logo, found there were 1,864 giant pand­as living in the wild. 5­0 giant panda research centres operate for the moment in China, one of them at C­hengdu — the so- called ‘panda capital o­f the world'.