Panda Anecdotes

Originally by Nexus Feng 04/18/2020

Giant Pandas are carnivores unique to my country, China. Their bodies are black and white. Many people like giant pandas because of their cute and sly looks.

I first noticed the Giant Pandas because of the panda named “Baiyun”. On September 10, 1996, Baiyun was transported to the San Diego Zoo with the other male Giant Panda Shi Shi (returned to China in 2003). In 1999, Bai Yun gave birth to Shi Shi’s daughter HuaMei through artificial insemination. In 2003, Baiyun fell in love with Gao, and in the same year gave birth to Mei Sheng.  After that, Baiyun and GaoGao successively gave birth to four more children.  GaoGao is deeply loved by the American people and is often times called the heroic mother.

Overseas, the giant panda has also become a representative of Chinese elements.  The Giant Panda was used as the main character in DreamWorks’ “Kung Fu Panda” series and Blizzard’s “World of Warcraft”.  However, there is a mistake in Kung Fu Panda where the Po’s tail is black, when in reality the panda’s tail is white (although it is often stained with mud, so it seems to be dyed black).

There is no such thing as “panda” in English originally. However, it was derived from the Nepalese transliteration. Pandas were purely described as “animals with long tails and orange fur”. Later, Father David discovered a “black and white bear” in Sichuan, China. According to his notes, the locals called this animal “white bear.”  Later, the specimen was sent back to France. Professor Edwards, then director of the Natural History Museum in Paris, found that this animal had the same habitat as the pandas (now red pandas) found before, and they all eat bamboo.  They both had 6 fingers, and they both had the structure of the “pseudo-thumb”, an extension of the carpal bone, which is formed for the convenience of grasping bamboo. This discovery allowed these two species to be linked as related, and thus the newly discovered black and white bear is also a panda.  Later, in order to distinguish between the two, their terms were distinguished: “Panda” and “Red Panda”.

The Playful Panda

The giant panda is a peculiar animal. It belongs to the order Carnivora, but it is a “vegetarian”, because more than 90% of its food comes from bamboo -which is still a scientific mystery. Bamboo is notoriously innutritious. More than 90% of the bamboo are all made of lignin and cellulose. There are no nutrients at all, thus there are not many animals that use bamboo as food.

I have read several hypotheses about this.  For example, because the number of bamboos is widely distributed, few animals eat bamboo, and in order to avoid competition with other animals, the Giant Pandas choose to eat bamboos; there are also studies showing that giant pandas lost their tasting genes due to genetic mutations about 4.2 million years ago – bamboo and meat tastes the same to them. Since then, they began eating bamboo (hunting is tiring); it is also said that other large carnivores, such as saber-toothed tigers, can be avoided in the bamboo forest.  Of course, all of the above are hypotheses, and the truth may not even be known to the pandas themselves. After all, millions of years have passed.

Perhaps millions of years ago, there was a group of ancestors of giant pandas who came to the bamboo forest for some reason, and they were trapped in the bamboo forest for unknown reasons.  The ancestors of giant pandas, which were originally omnivores as bears, had to live in bamboo forests with scarce resources.  They could have eaten meat occasionally, but since they can only endure hunger and starvation for a certain period of time, they had to start nibbling the bamboo.

Later, after generations and generations of these survival choices, they lost their sense of taste. Slowly, Giant Pandas started eating bamboos as their main source of food. 

Of course, these are just my superficial conjectures.

Every zoo’s hero  

The Giant Panda looks lazy and peaceful, harmless to humans and animals, with even the WWF’s introduction to the Giant Panda as “a peaceful, bamboo-eating animal.”

Although pandas are vegetarian, they are genuine members of the Carnivora family, and they will always eat meat when they see it.  Because their movement is slow, they can only catch bamboo rats or eat some carrion.  Moreover, the giant panda chews bamboo all year round, allowing them to develop sharp teeth that only they have.

Historically, wild pandas live in the same habitat with leopards, jackals, and brown bears in the wild, but these beasts generally only threaten the Giant Pandas when they are under two years of age and are frail. After all, healthy adult wild pandas weigh more than 100 kilograms, which is not to be easily underestimated.

Will this cute Black and White animal have a better tomorrow?

For a long time, the giant panda is equivalent to “endangered” and “national-level protected animals” in people’s minds.  In 2016, due to China’s efforts to protect giant pandas, the number of wild giant pandas started slowly rising, so the IUCN lowered the threat status of Giant Pandas from “endangered” to “vulnerable”.  At this time, nearly 2,000 wild pandas have been distributed in six mountain systems including Qinling and Minshan in Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces.

However, the future of the giant panda population is still not optimistic.

First of all, although the habitat is wide, the area of ​​each habitat is not large, and when combined, it is only as large as one and a half of Beijing.  Moreover, the various habitats are not connected, separating the Giant Pandas into independent populations that cannot communicate and multiply with each othe.  This situation may have been effective in the short term, but in the long run, a sudden epidemic can easily wipe out a certain population … The protection of the giant panda is based on the protection of the habitat.

The mascot of the 2021 Summer World University Games was identified a few days ago as a Giant Panda named “Rong Bao”. China is the hometown of giant pandas, and Sichuan is known as the main hotbed for the Giant Pandas. The Panda symbol has finally returned to where it originally came from.

Maybe you have long thought that pandas are cute, or maybe you have no idea what they are. But the most important thing is perhaps not to allow this unique species to disappear from the earth forever because then, it will be on our heads forever.