スミソニアン国立動物園のインスタグラム(smithsonianzoo) - 8月11日 01時59分

The next chapter in #PandaStory has officially begun. Our scientists confirmed that Mei Xiang’s levels of urinary progesterone are rising. That means she will give birth to a cub, or experience the final stages of a pseudopregnancy in 30 to 50 days.

The only way to definitively confirm if Mei is actually pregnant is to detect a fetus on an ultrasound. Our veterinary team will continue to perform ultrasounds twice each week as long as Mei is willing to participate. Even though hormones can’t tell our panda team if Mei is pregnant, hormones can tell them what stage of a pregnancy or pseudopregnancy Mei is in. In the photos above our endocrinologists are running an assay to test the urinary progesterone concentration in Mei’s urine. (The assay can only read a specific range of progesterone concentration, and each urine is different which is why there are so many samples.) Our endocrinologist preps the samples, loads them up for the assay, incubates them for 30 min., and then waits for them to change color. The samples change from blue to yellow. Our spectrophotometer reads hormone concentrations in the yellow range. After the assay is finished our endocrinologists plug the data into a graph and interpret it. Over the weekend it was clear that Mei Xiang’s urinary progesterone levels were rising, and the slow rise had probably started around July 20. #Instascience #WeSaveSpecies

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