Websearching “panda population” should give some indication of the answers to those questions.
Understanding them better may be one step toward helping them in the wild. It’s certainly one step toward being able to keep the species from going extinct while we try to find ways to help them in the wild. It’s certainly not a solution yet, and may never be a solution, but it’s emphatically not wasted effort.
And since we’re going to keep some pandas in zoos anyway, not trying to understand them better would be a criminal waste of resources.
