Innovative research with captive animals has one all important goal, understanding the needs of their counterparts in the wild. For endangered pandas, that's a world seven thousand miles away, high in the misty bamboo mountains of China.

Pandas are such dedicated bamboo eaters, they've even evolved a pseudo-thumb to grasp the stalks.

But the bamboo forest is shrinking and sometimes large patches flower all at once, seed, and then die. Then there isn't enough for the pandas to eat.

In the 1970's, disaster struck when a mass die-off of bamboo occurred. Many pandas died.

But when another bamboo die-off began in the 1980's, the Chinese were ready. They brought the starving pandas down from the mountains and into captivity.

Many came here, to the Wolong Conservation Center for Giant Pandas.

This is one of China's two major panda research centers.

At first, Wolong keepers nursed the pandas back to health in the hopes of returning them to the wild. They added milk and bread to their diet because even here, keepers can't gather enough bamboo to sustain the pandas. Each one can eat around fifty pounds of bamboo a day.

So, the Chinese made a kind of bamboo helper -- by mixing ground-up bamboo with rice, corn, vitamins and minerals.

The resulting flour is baked into a nutritious bread.

The pandas revived and the Chinese hoped to start a breeding program. But years went by without a single birth. What's more, poaching had become a serious problem.

This crippled animal lost its paw in a poacher's snare. Wolong's pandas weren't going back into the wild.

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