TAIPEI: Taiwan’s first panda couple will need at least another year before producing any offspring, even after a Chinese sex expert was called in to help raise their libido, the Taipei Zoo said Monday.

Zhang Hemin, head of the Wolong Giant Panda Protection Research Centre in southwest China, visited the zoo Sunday to offer his advice on Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, who have spent nearly a year here showing little sex drive.

His prescription was to lock them up in separate cages for several months to see if enforced abstinence could trigger the instinct to procreate, according to an official with the zoo.

‘Separation is likely to make Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan more sexually attracted to each other,’ said the official, who asked not to be named.

The most likely scenario is for the two pandas, a gift from China, to mate successfully in the spring of 2011 and have the cub during the summer of the same year, he said.

The official also said the zoo was training the couple to stand on their hind legs as experience had shown strong musculature in this part of the body tends to help in the act of mating.

The two pandas were transported with great fanfare to Taiwan in late 2008, amid hopes that they would soon become proud parents,

China’s decision to offer Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan to Taiwan was a symbolic gesture to show improved ties between the former arch enemies, governed separately since the end of a civil war in 1949. —AFP