But wait -- we thought pandas were notoriously slow breeders?

Well, not all of them, it turns out. These 23 baby panda bears, all between one and four months old, were born this year at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in southwest China. Apparently, the panda-fertility docs are stepping up their game.

"We used to mate the pandas by observing their behaviors to decide the timing for mating," said Wu Kongju, animal management director at the base. "But now we combine behavior observation with endocrine analysis to get more accurate timing, thus ensuring a fairly high breeding rate."

So yeah, pretty soon we'll be getting baby pandas as pets. Neat!

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