Free The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernández Page B

taking in my surroundings and marveling at how uncanny this all is. It really feels like I’m a panda.
    But I’m wrong. I have no idea what it means to be a panda. Not yet.
    Not until they activate the nose.

    Early humans had a much better sense of smell and taste than we do today. Studies have shown that, depending on the individual, somewhere between 40% to 70% of the genes devoted to those senses are inactive in modern homo sapiens.
    While those with a mere 40% of their olfactory genes deactivated might make excellent sommeliers, those with 70% get along just fine. “We don’t need acute olfaction and gustation to detect traces of poison or putrefaction the way our ancestors did,” says Dr. Natalie Borelli, a Cal Tech professor of biocybernetics and director of Good Taste, a federally-funded program trying to create a prosthetic human tongue that allows users to both taste and speak. “We don’t need to sniff out our food, or detect camouflaged predators. For us, there are very few situations in which smell is a matter of life and death.”
    But for the panda, smell serves as the organizing principle for life. Sight just tells the bears what’s in front of them at the moment—and for the panda, it doesn’t even do that very well. Pandas have relatively weak eyesight, and even if they could see better, most of the time they’d be staring at the same informationless wall of bamboo just inches from their snouts. Hearing gives them more range than sight,but is similarly limited to the here and now.
    Smell, however, tells the history of their territory reaching back months. Sometimes you will see a panda approach a tree or a large rock and seem to snarl at it. But that lip-curling, called the “flehmen response,” actually exposes its vomeronasal organ, which allows it to detect the pheromones of other pandas. Those pheromones tell it what pandas have been in the area, how recently, their genders, how big they are—vitally important if you’re weighing your chances in a fight for a mate—and how close females are to estrus.
    That last bit is especially important. Sows are in estrus for a bedevilingly short time, sometime for only a single day of the year. But thanks to his vomeronasal organ, a panda boar knows when that all-important day will be. A boar will enjoy most of mating season not by mating, but by mellowing out to estrogen-drenched sow-pee, growing accustomed to the pleasures of its one-of-a-kind bouquet, recognizing it as friendly and desirable, and having their testicles triple in size through a process called “spermatogenesis.”
    This is a key aspect to how pandas mate in the wild, a lesson humans were slow to learn when they tried to mate captive bears. Without this long, leisurely process of familiarization, a boar is more likely to maul a sow than mate with her: which, unfortunately, has led to the maiming or death of more than a few eligible she-bears in captivity, sometimes in front of a horrified zoo-going crowd.
    For the most part, pandas are solitary creatures. There is no term of venery for a group of pandas. We could default to the generic termsfor groups of bears: a “sleuth” or a “sloth.” We could take one of the adhoc suggestions from the Internet: a “cuddle,” an “ascension,” a “contrast,” or my favorite, a “monium” of pandas. But the fact is there isn’t much need to speak of pandas in groups, since they spend almost all of their time alone.
    There are two exceptions. One is when a mother is tending to a newborn cub. Even then, however, you wouldn’t speak of a group of pandas, since the mother usually gives birth to a pair of cubs but tends to only one, leaving the other to die. Mother and cub will go their separate ways once the cub can fend for itself.
    The other exception, however, is that fateful day when a sow is ready to mate. Then it can truly be said that pandas gather. Boars will contend with each other—usually through demonstrations of strength