He handed it to Dearie, who rushed the cub to the keepers’ office, which is stocked with incubators and other emergency equipment.
Boedeker tried to intubate the cub to establish a good flow of oxygen, but its airway was too tiny, Kelly said.
She then did heart massage for about 10 minutes, Kelly said, and stopped when it was clear that the cub could not be revived.
“This is devastating news for the entire Smithsonian National Zoo community,” he said. “Our staff, our volunteers, the people all over Washington and all over the nation that were following the wonderful announcement of the birth of this cub.”
The zoo said it was not clear what happened, but a necropsy was scheduled to be performed Sunday night by John Roberts, a zoo veterinarian pathologist. The zoo said it might have some preliminary results by Monday.
“We’re all very anxious to know what happened,” chief veterinarian Suzan Murray said.
Murray noted that upon preliminary examination, “the cub looked just fabulous. There were no external signs of trauma, no signs of clinical illness or disease, nor had we seen anything in the last few days or the past 24 hours to indicate that anything was wrong.”
“The cub was just beautiful,” Murray said, her voice shaking for a second. “Beautiful little body. Beautiful face, with the markings just beginning to show around the eye. Couldn’t have been more beautiful.”
Mei Xiang had been “a fabulous mom, taking very good care of the cub,” Murray said. Indeed, Mei Xiang had been holding the cub so close to her body, apparently to nurse it and keep it warm, that zoo officials had scarcely been able to glimpse it on the panda cam monitoring the den.
It was the sixth giant panda cub to die at the zoo, going back to the 1980s. A seventh cub was stillborn. The only cub to survive into maturity has been Tai Shan, who was born to Mei Xiang and Tian Tian in 2005.
Giant panda cubs, like many newborns at the zoo, are extremely fragile.
Murray said the zoo’s giant panda pair appeared to be in good health Sunday, although the staff had a close eye on Mei Xiang because it was the first time she had lost a cub.
The cub was born a week ago, at 10:46 p.m. Sept. 16, to jubilation across the region.
The surprise birth came after five failed attempts to impregnate Mei Xiang, and zoo experts thought the chance of her having another cub was less than 10 percent.
“There are so many things that can go wrong in the first week of life,” Murray said.
In 2010, a newborn red panda cub died at the zoo. That cub was found lifeless on July 7 and was rushed to the zoo’s veterinary hospital, where its death was confirmed. The male cub, born June 16, 2010, was the first red panda cub born at the zoo in 15 years.
The zoo said there is a 50 percent mortality rate for red panda cubs born in captivity.
Much smaller than giant pandas, red pandas resemble a cross between a fox and a raccoon.
In the 1980s, five giant panda cubs were born to Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, who were given to the United States by China in 1972.
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