Oldest giant panda triplets celebrate 10th birthday with bamboo cake

Meng Meng, Shuai Shuai and Ku Ku, the world’s oldest giant panda triplets, are now 10 years old.

Their birthday was earlier this week, on 29 July.

The trio celebrated the occasion at home in Chimelong Safari Park in Guangzhou, China, where they were presented with a cake while visitors sang a birthday song to them.

The cake was made from their favourite foods: bamboo shoots, carrots, fruit chunks and honey water.

The triplets were born in 2014, all within just four hours of each other.

Their mother Ju Xiao gave birth to Meng Meng, the only female of the litter, first.

All three cubs were subsequently hand-reared in order to increase their chances of survival.

Only four cases of giant panda triplet births have ever been recorded, and details of the first three are very sparse.

Meng Meng, Shuai Shuai and Ku Ku as newborn cubs

The China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda has confirmed that Meng Meng, Shuai Shuai and Ku Ku remain the only surviving giant panda triplets in the world.

The good news is that wild panda numbers are now rebounding after years of decline, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has reclassified them as “vulnerable” instead of “endangered”.

And last month, Meng Meng gave birth to a female panda cub of her own.

To date, Chimelong Safari Park has bred 11 panda cubs born through eight pregnancies, earning it the nickname “Panda Blessed Land”.

(Left to right) Meng Meng, Shuai Shuai and Ku Ku

The average lifespan of a panda in the wild is 15-20 years, increasing to 30 years in captivity.

The oldest panda ever was a female named Jia Jia, who died in 2016 at the age of 38. 

Here are some other elderly animals who celebrated their birthday in recent months (and who coincidentally all live in Germany!)

• Fatou, the oldest living gorilla in captivity, turned 67 in April. She was brought to Europe in 1959 by a French sailor who used her to pay off his bar tab; Fatou was then acquired by an animal trader and sold to Berlin Zoo, where she’s lived ever since.
• Bella, the world’s oldest living orangutan in captivity, also had her birthday in April. She turned 63 and was given a cake made of soft-boiled rice and various fruits at her home in Hagenbeck Zoo, Hamburg.
• Jan, the oldest living sloth in captivity and oldest sloth in captivity ever, turned 54, more than doubling his species’ average life expectancy.  

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