Giant panda, ailuropoda melanoleuca, is a typical bear. It is completely white except for black fur on its ears, around its eyes, muzzle, legs, and shoulders. Giant pandas first became endangered in 1990 due to excessive poaching in the 80s and deforestation, depleting their bamboo food source. However, in 2016, their extinction status got boosted from endangered to vulnerable.
A regular giant panda eats bamboo for 12 out of 24 hours a day. This happens because bamboo isn’t very nutritious. They only digest approximately twenty percent of what they eat, so they have to eat a lot, and fast, or they don’t get enough nutrition. Then, they sleep for the rest of the day to conserve their energy to digest the bamboo. This bear relieves itself dozens of times during a day, because of all the water in their food. Pandas can eat 28 pounds of bamboo shoots and leaves, which is 15 percent of their body weight – over 1 percent – every hour! Giant pandas are probably poorly adapted to bamboo, because they used to be carnivores. However, they simply love it, so it is a huge percentage of their diets. If they cannot find anything else to eat, they may also eat small animals and fish, or other types of vegetation.
The giant panda has lived in bamboo forest for a few million years. It is highly specialized and has adapted uniquely to China. They have a thick, wooly coat that keeps it warm in the chilly bamboo forests. Giant pandas have giant molar teeth and giant, strong jaw muscles to crush giant and tough bamboo. Of course, they’re not all that giant. Not strangely, a good amount of people find these bulky and bumbling animals to be cute, but watch out, if you provoke one, those carnivorous instincts will come rushing in, and giant pandas can be quite dangerous!
If they are on all four legs, or laying about, they are around two to three feet tall at the shoulder, and 4 to 6 feet in length. In the wild, males and females are different weights, the male being up to two hundred and fifty pounds but the female almost never reaching 220. They can live from 15-20 years, although in zoos pandas can live to thirty, and are bigger and heavier, on account of the foods that are given to them other than bamboo. The oldest panda who ever lived was Jia Jia, a female giant panda in captivity who was born in 1978. She lived to be 38 years old.
Giant pandas can be found in zoos, yet in the wild they only exist in the remote regions of central China. Part of the reason is because there are many bamboo forests in China, and since they are in high areas, the forests are cool and wet, just like a panda likes them. If the giant panda isn’t in a forest, it will climb up to 13,000 feet just to reach the bamboo shoots.
A female panda can give birth to one or two panda cubs after being pregnant for five months. Unfortunately, the panda cannot take care for both cubs, so usually only one survives.
Pandas go number two more than 100 times a day, producing more than 40 pounds of waste, which is the same as four bowling balls. They have tiny cubs because of their poor diet. The cubs are born blind, helpless, and tiny, weighing just 5 ounces, which is 1/1000 the size of their mom.
These panda cubs are dependent on their mothers for up to three years before they can leave and live on their own. Therefore, at best a wild female panda can give birth to cubs every other year. They may only successfully raise five to eight cubs. Giant pandas are very bad at keeping their babies alive. In five years at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. five different cubs died, due to infection but mostly panda infant mortality.
Cubs do not officially wake up until they are 6-8 weeks old, and not ready to move around by themselves until they are three months old. A cub may nurse for eight or nine months and can eat adult food at 1 years old, although they are not socially mature until two years.
Giant pandas reach breeding maturity around four to eight years old. They are reproductive until age 20. Every year in the spring, female pandas have a baby. She is in heat for only two or three days. Scents and calls draw pandas together to mate.
Although many people don’t know, pandas are very good swimmers. Since they eat almost completely bamboo, they have a healthy diet, so they are actually very lean under all the fur. Male pandas can relax by doing handstands against trees! Scientists are stilled stumped at why these pandas are black and white, but they have a couple theories, of which one is that they camouflage well in the dense stalks of bamboo.
In the wilderness, giant pandas nap between eating for 2-4 hours at a time. This happens in a zoo, too. They like to catch some Zs by dozing on their side, back, or belly, either sprawled like a crooked starfish, or curled up. Pandas sleep similarly to humans, but they sleep on tree branches sometimes too though. They continue to defecate when they are resting.
It seems like giant pandas never developed visual communication, most likely because they are solitary animals that live mostly by themselves. Another reason is because, in their habitat, dense stands of bamboo block a direct line of sight and some visual communications. They do not communicate with each other with body characteristics and visual signals. Other animals’ characteristics could be face expressions, flagging signals, erecting their crests or manes, and ears cocking forward or flattening. But giant pandas don’t do any of those. Their faces are circular and inscrutable, and their tails are stubs, similar to a bunny’s or rabbit’s, hence they cannot flag. The pandas have no crest or mane, and their ears are only flexible enough to wiggle a little. From time to time giant pandas vocalize. They use abundantly detailed vocalizations to express their different moods. Sometimes, they also communicate by scratching on trees and leaving unpleasant scent markers.
Giant pandas are generally loners. They don’t like being around each other so they have an enhanced sense of smell to be aware if other pandas are near so they can avoid them. Pandas can also be aggressive to each other. If they accidentally come into contact with an organism of the same species as them, they will wrangle with each other by growling, swatting, and biting each other until the less persistent one gives up and retreats. It is a challenge for zoologists to breed pandas, as sometimes they refuse to mate. Additionally, bamboo in the wild seems to be diminishing because pandas are gobbling it all up.
Today, pandas are at a higher risk of habitat loss than predatory animals. Human development has driven pandas into isolated fragmented mountain regions, so they can no longer get bamboo. Additionally, climate change might eliminate a third of the bamboo habitat that pandas rely on by the end of the century.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, started a strengthening relationship with China by visiting the country, the first time a US president had done so. The president of China, Mao Zedong, gave America male panda Hsing-Hsing and his mate, Ling Ling as gifts. The White House gave China a pair of musk oxen in return. Time and again, the two pandas mated, but unfortunately they left no surviving cubs, even with the assistance of science. Between 1983 and 1989, Ling-Ling gave birth to five pandas, but not a single one of them survived over five days.