And so, late last night, the professor of pandas made a call: at last Tian Tian was hormonally ready but her behaviour was "not conducive" to naturalmating.
Scientists long ago discovered, for example, how to give crop plants new traits by forcibly mating them with unrelated wild species known to contain natural pesticides, carcinogens, and anti-nutrients.
The explanation for this paradox, put forward by Leonardo Campagna of the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, is that they are incipient species, separated by the mating preferences of females but not yet by genetics.