Pandas switched to fruit-only diet after earthquake devastates bamboo

These are tough times to be a national symbol in China. Most of the pandas at the earthquake-devastated Wolong research centre in Sichuan province have been evacuated to other parts of the country, just days after being taken off bamboo shoots and put on a strange diet of fruit.

The fate of the pandas is closely watched in Chengdu, the province's capital city, where the bears are also the city's symbol. The city's residents – exhausted by the litany of pain and hardship following the earthquake on 12 May that left 90,000 dead or missing and millions more homeless – have been following the furry beasts' fate, hopeful for a bit of good news. Sadly, they may have to wait.

The Wolong panda centre lies just 19 miles from the epicentre of the quake at Wenchuan and was devastated by the tremor.

One panda was killed and another is still missing, and nobody knows how many wild pandas have died. Earthquakes play havoc with the panda's favourite food, bamboo. A big earthquake in Sichuan province, in south-west China, in 1976 caused the death of large amounts of bamboo, leading to a famine.

This year, damage to the bamboo forest in earthquake sites such as Dujiangyan and Mianyang has led to a sharp reduction in the amount of shoots on offer for the pandas, which now must make do with fruit and seeds. And with landslides and other quake-related hazards in the mountainous areas still a big threat, the surviving pandas have had to move. It was an arduous 13-hour trek by road for six of the Wolong pandas to their temporary shelter in the Ya'an Bifengxia base in Sichuan, the first part of the evacuation plan. Ya'an is preparing to receive another 27 adults and cubs.

Huang Zhi, the evacuation team leader, said the transferred pandas ranged in age from eight to 13 years and all were female.

They included Guo Guo, a pregnant 12-year-old panda who is due to give birth in about three weeks. The pandas were kept in two-tier cages with beds and lots of padding to keep them comfortable.

"In order to minimise the hardship for the pandas being evacuated, we had to make regular stops. Every 70 [44 miles] to 80 kilometres we gave them a rest, fed them and sprinkled them with water," he said.

Mr Huang added that they were worried when passing over Jiajin Mountain, where the peak is 4,000 metres (13,100ft) above sea level and pandas normally have difficulty above 3,500 metres. "The pandas will be exhausted after hundreds of kilometres of travel. It will take them a few days to recover," he said.

Another 19 pandas are to be moved to a breeding and research centre in Chengdu – a blow for Wolong as there has long been a healthy rivalry between the two panda centres.

There are reckoned to be 1,590 pandas living in the wild, all of them in China, and the numbers have been rising in recent years after conservation efforts. Most of the docile breeding-averse beasts – about 1,400 – were in the part of Sichuan that was wrecked by the quake. And it's not just the actual animals that have been suffering in the wake of the national disaster. The Hollywood kung-fu animation film Kung Fu Panda was initially banned in Sichuan because of complaints that it was in poor taste and disrespectful given the human and animal quake deaths.

However, the film was screened after internet users insisted that the victims who lived in the quake zone needed a decent movie to cheer them up.

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