Pandas

What looks like a bear and acts like a bear, but isn’t a bear?

You guessed it—it is a panda. With their cute black eye patches and white faces, cuddly looking pandas are a fan favorite among zoo-goers and intrepid visitors to the China’s panda sanctuaries. For a long time, animal scientists could not decide on whether pandas were related to bears, or even possibly raccoons. But recent advances in science helped scientists realize pandas belong to an animal family all their own. It is known as Ailuridae. While bears belong to the Ursidae family and raccoons are from the Procyonidae family.

90-98% of a panda’s diet is bamboo. Unfortunately, in China, many of the bamboo forest were cut down to make room for humans to grow crops for food. As a result, the panda population almost disappeared. Scientists estimated that there were only about 1,000 pandas in all of China and they were in danger of extinction. But thankfully because they are so cute, people around the world united to help save them from extinction. Today, there are now over 1900 pandas in the wild. With a few more in select zoos around the world. They are on loan to the zoos—for a price. The money the zoos are charged goes to funding the panda sanctuaries in China and the research needed to protect them and help their population grow.

Pandas reproduce slowly and not very often. A baby panda lives with its mother until it is eighteen months old before it leaves home and goes out on its own. Then the mother is only fertile for 2-3 days in the entire year. Since pandas are solitary creatures, a female panda may not get pregnant again for many years. When they get pregnant, they may have twins. Unfortunately, many times, one twin is overlooked and dies.

To save the pandas, and increase their population, scientists came up with the idea to use the world’s zoos with their highly trained veterinarian staffs, to help the pandas with their slow reproduction problems. That is why China loans out their rare pandas to select zoos around the world. Thanks to that program, many new pandas have been born and returned to the panda sanctuaries in China.

Pandas were so rare that no European had observed a live one in the wild until Walter Stötzner’s expedition of 1913-15. The only other reported sighting before then was from a Catholic missionary named Armand David, who saw some panda furs in 1869.

China now has over 40 panda sanctuaries in the remote mountain regions of the Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces. The sanctuaries protect the animals against poachers and help them breed so that their population will grow.

A baby panda only weighs about 4 ounces when it is born—that’s less than a candy bar. And it is only about as long as a pencil at birth. Its eyes are closed for the first 45 days after it is born, and it is virtually helpless. It depends entirely on its mother for warmth, nourishment, positioning at the breast, and stimulating the passage of wastes.

And speaking of poop—bamboo is not very nutritious. So, a panda has to eat a lot of it in order to stay alive. A panda eats 16-19 hours a day, and that is a lot of bamboo for the panda to digest. So, it has to poop over 50 times a day to make room for all the bamboo it has to eat.

When they aren’t foraging for food to eat. Pandas like to play. That’s why pandas like living in the zoos. There they don’t have to spend all their days searching for bamboo to eat. Instead, they get to spend their time playing and entertaining visitors. And they live longer, too. Captive pandas may live beyond 30 years in captivity, but their life span in the wild is estimated at about 20 years.

Although they are cute and cuddly looking, male pandas can grow to be six feet tall and weigh over two hundred pounds. Females are usually smaller. Although they are usually slow moving and clumsy, Pandas do climb high in a tree to reach the bamboo they need to eat.

Unlike most other bears, pandas do not hibernate. When winter approaches, they head lower down their mountain homes to warmer temperatures, where they continue to chomp away on bamboo! And thanks to conservation efforts panda bear numbers are increasing in the wild. Though there’s still lots of work to be done, the species is no longer considered endangered. Hooray!

AIME