How to clear out the situation of the wild giant pandas as to its specific numbers, sex proportion, age structures and living conditions in China, a new technology achieved recently by Chinese scientists is expected to find out the details by studying their stools.

As informed from the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base, a fingerprint probe, jointly developed by the Base and Sichuan University after times of practices and experiments in many research units has turned out a success. So far it is the only apparatus that can be used not only to discriminate the identities of a single animal, the parenthood and to tell their genetic background. The research item has been prized the second of 1999 National Technological Invention Awards.

Taking giant panda as an example the newly developed technology has overcome the world difficult problem in picking up the entire genomes from stools of wild animals. Meanwhile, it has established for the first time a system for the study of wild animal species ecology and protective genetics. The number, sex, age structure, family structure, variability and evolutional units can be determined by studying the stools collected.