Each morning humans compete for position at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Central China.

Marc Valitutto: When I'm out on the street, and if anybody asks me about what I do, I tell them, "I work with giant pandas," they immediately thank me.

Enriching the treasure is the work of Marc Valitutto, a wildlife veterinarian from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, on loan to the Chengdu Research Base. .

Scott Pelley: Is bamboo the only thing they eat?

Marc Valitutto: 99% of their diet in the wild is bamboo.

Marc Valitutto: Only once a year can a female be prepared for breeding.

Scott Pelley: A female panda is capable of breeding three days a year.

Marc Valitutto: Exactly?

Scott Pelley: and, how old are these cubs.

Scott Pelley: And how many cubs do you bring into the world in a year.

Scott Pelley: Of the five cubs that are born here this year, how many do you expect to survive.

About half the time, pandas have twins but the mother can't care for both.

Marc Valitutto: In the wild, the smaller, the weaker twin will be left off to die, because the mother doesn't have enough energy to produce the amount of milk that's required for two babies?

Marc Valitutto: So, the females can be up to maybe around 200 pounds, and the males up to 300 pounds.

Scott Pelley: Why are they black and white.

Marc Valitutto: You know, that's a very interesting question.

Marc Valitutto: You know pandas love the snow.

She's director of research and told us that the base started as a shelter for injured pandas that had been rescued. .

Scott Pelley: You had a dozen pandas.

200 healthy pandas have grown from the research into nutrition and understanding those fleeting female hormones.

In 1937, a leading American naturalist described the giant panda as "an extremely stupid beast, dull and primitive." But Marc Valitutto showed us pandas understand commands.

Marc Valitutto: All of the pandas, the adult pandas here, are trained specifically to offer their arm for a blood sample?

Marc Valitutto: They're incredibly complex creatures, just like many other bear species or carnivorous species like dogs and cats.

Melissa Songer: This is the Chengdu Field Research Center and most people know it as Panda Valley.

There are fewer than 2,000 wild pandas, living in only three mountainous provinces of china

But those few failures have slowed the research because if a panda is killed, it's not just some 'bear,' it's a bear with a name, and a million "likes" on its webpage

Melissa Songer: Any time you release a captive animal to the wild you're taking a risk

China says it will soon spend more than a billion dollars on a 10,000 square mile panda national reserve to connect those pockets of wild bears

Marc Valitutto: It absolutely does

But more than that, what's even better than the survivability of this species is that they are an umbrella species, meaning that the care that we provide for the pandas and the tracts of land that we preserve, will also save a whole multitude of other species that also need our care, that a lot of people don't even know about