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Edinburgh Zoo is in negotiations to bring a pair of giant pandas from China to Scotland.

Zoo representatives recently returned from China, where they signed a letter of intent signifying a commitment to bring giant pandas to Edinburgh.

It has been proposed that a breeding pair would be on loan to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) for 10 years.

It is hoped they would give birth to cubs during that time.

However, one campaign group has criticised the move.

Libby Anderson, a spokeswoman for Advocates for Animals, said: “We always have reservations about captive breeding programmes because they don’t have a very high rate of success. If you’re going to carry out breeding programmes, do it in the wild.

“The pandas were described in the press as a great crowd-puller. You have to ask what is the priority here for the zoo - is it to pull in crowds, to use animals for entertainment or a realistic endeavour to save pandas?”

‘Ensure survival’

Edinburgh would be only the eighth zoo in the Western hemisphere to care for the species if the project goes ahead.

Zoo chiefs said that looking after the endangered animals could benefit conservation.

David Windmill, chief executive of RZSS, said: “Working with giant pandas means so much more to us than introducing a new species to our collection.

“It is an opportunity to work on a global level with other conservationists to gain a better understanding of the giant panda, the threats they face, and what we can do to ensure their survival.”

There are currently only around 1,500 giant pandas in the wild.

RZSS has been working on the project for almost a year, and hopes to have giant pandas at Edinburgh Zoo by 2009, the year of the society’s centenary.

Mr Windmill said that the project had received strong support from the UK and Scottish Governments and that this must continue if the zoo is to reach an agreement with the Chinese.

As part of the proposed agreement with the Chinese government, Edinburgh Zoo will collaborate on research projects benefiting conservation in the wild.

RZSS will also provide substantial funding to support giant panda conservation projects in the wild.

Giant pandas live in a few mountain ranges in central China and feed almost exclusively on bamboo, which makes up 99% of their diet.

The UK’s only mountain dwelling species of butterfly could be wiped out in Scotland because of climate change, experts have warned.

Warmer temperatures are driving the mountain ringlet higher up hillsides in the search for cooler conditions.

Butterfly Conservation Scotland (BCS) has appealed to the public to report sightings as part of a Scottish Natural Heritage-funded project.

People are also asked to look for northern dart and netted mountain moth.

Paul Kirkland, BCS director, said ringlet faced a very real threat.

He said: “This butterfly is retreating higher up the hillsides as the warmer weather makes lower habitats unsuitable.

“The fear is that as climate change continues, this rare species will run out of mountain, and become extinct in Scotland.”

The flip side of global warming has seen species which have died out in the south surviving in Scotland.

They include chequered skipper butterfly, Kentish glory and New Forest Burnet moth.

Mr Kirkland said: “There are already parts of Scotland harbouring butterflies that have become extinct in England, and the largely unspoilt landscape found in the uplands is an increasingly important habitat.

“It is essential that we find out exactly what is hiding in the hills.”

There are 33 species of butterfly that regularly breed in Scotland and about 1,300 species of moths.

A male and female snowy owl seen on North Uist the Western Isles could become the UK’s first breeding pair in 30 years, RSPB Scotland said.

Last year two birds were spotted, but they were both males.

In the past few days, a female bird has been spotted at the RSPB’s Balranald Reserve and a male just a few miles away at Grenitote.

The previous pair to breed in the UK was on Shetland in 1975, the wild bird conservation charity said.

The birds of prey may have arrived on Uist from North America and could remain until summer if they breed.

Martin Scott, Western Isles officer with RSPB Scotland, said: “This is great news, these birds are an absolutely spectacular sight and an inspiration to anyone that’s lucky enough to see them.

“Just to have snowy owls around is special enough, but to have the prospect of them breeding is even better.”

The sloth’s popular image as a lazy creature that sleeps for most of the day has been called into question.

Rather than snoozing for more than 16 hours a day, as observed in captivity, sloths in the wild doze for less than 10 hours, research suggests.

Scientists caught sloths living in the rainforest of Panama and fitted them with a device that monitors sleep.

The findings, published in a Royal Society journal, may help shed light on human sleep disorders, they say.

Lead researcher Niels Rattenborg, of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, said the study demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to record sleep in a wild animal.

“The real exciting finding was that they only slept 9.6 hours a day, which is much less than what people popularly believed and less than had been observed in a previous study of sloths in captivity,” he told BBC News.

“So they still may be sloth-like in terms of their speed of movement but in terms of their sleep they don’t seem to sleep an inordinate amount of time.”

The work, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, attempts to find traits that predict whether an animal sleeps more or less than another species. This might provide clues to the function of sleep, said Dr Rattenborg.

He added: “I think this finding is really going to open the door to a whole new age of sleep research on animals sleeping in their natural habitat.”

Proof of principle

Animals vary in the amount of sleep they need. Pythons, for example, sleep for 18 hours a day, while giraffes survive on just two hours.

To investigate sleeping patterns in wild sloths, the scientists, from Germany, Switzerland and the US, developed a small machine capable of monitoring brain patterns associated with sleep.

They caught three female brown-throated three-toed sloths living in rainforest near the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island, Panama.

The animals were fitted with the data recorder and then released.

When re-captured several days later, measurements showed that they slept for an average of 9.6 hours a day, compared with a sleep time of 16 hours a day reported in sloths kept in captivity.

Dr Neil Stanley, an expert in sleep disorders at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, UK, said animals tended to sleep much more in captivity, where they have all their needs met.

“It’s intuitive that animals would sleep less in the wild than in captivity - this technology gives us the opportunity to prove that’s true,” he said.

Despite many years of research into the function of sleep, there are still many unresolved questions.

It is known that sleep plays an important role in maintaining normal mental functions, but the precise mechanisms are unclear.