after years of having their feeding habits, sex lives and even bowel movements studied and analysed by a friendly but prurient public, the 67 residents of the Chengdu giant panda research base are now being forced to diet.

Their daily supply is to be cut to around half the 100lb of shoots a day they normally eat. Their enclosures are being supplied with fruit and animal feed instead, but pandas are notoriously picky eaters and some are losing weight, officials said.

Bringing in supplies from outside Sichuan is difficult because of damaged roads throughout the region.

To complicate matters further, the rationing has begun during the breeding cycle, when they would normally be increasing their intake.

The fate of the pandas has been a sideshow to the Sichuan disaster, in which 70,000 people are known to have died, with 18,000 still listed as missing.

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Wenchuan county, the epicentre, is home to the pandas' second main breeding and research base at Wolong, where one panda died and another remains missing. Five members of staff at Wolong also died.

State forestry administration officials have expressed concern about the very future of the breed. As well as the destruction of many bamboo forests, after a previous earthquake bamboo is known to have flowered unexpectedly.

The cyclical flowering of bamboo is a disaster for pandas, as it is followed by a die-off. In the last major die-off, scores of pandas died of starvation, unable to reach unaffected bamboo forests because of human