Scientific Name: Ailuropoda melanoleuca
Family Name: Ursidae
Trophic Level: Folivore
Description: The giant panda has luxuriant black and white fur. The
giant panda has a body shape typical to bears. It has black fur on its
ears, eye patches, muzzle, legs, arms and shoulders. The rest of the
animal’s coat is white. The bold colouring provides effective
camouflage in their shade-dappled snowy and rocky habitat, and that
their eye patches might facilitate them identifying another. The giant
panda’s thick, woolly coat keeps it warm in the cool forests of its
habitat. The panda’s skull shape is typical of durophages carnivorans.
The giant panda’s paw has a thumb and five fingers; the thumb is a
modified sesamoid bone.
Life Span: The giant panda typically lives around 20 years in the wild
and up to 30 years in captivity.
Diet: Despite its taxonomic classification as a carnivoran, the giant
panda's diet is primarily herbivores, consisting almost exclusively of
bamboo. Giant pandas in the wild will occasionally eat other grasses,
wild tubers, or even meat in the form of birds, rodents, or carrion. In
captivity, they may receive honey, eggs, fish, yams, shrub leaves,
oranges, or bananas along with specially prepared food.
Habitat: It is native to South Central China. The giant panda lives in a
few mountain ranges in central China, mainly in Sichuan, but also in
neighbouring Shaanxi and Gansu.
Predators: young cubs are vulnerable to attacks by Snow
Leopards, Yellow-throated martens, eagles, feral dogs, and the Asian
black-bear. Sub-adults weighing up to 50 kg (110 lb) may be vulnerable
to predation by leopards.
Height: Adults measure around 1.2 to 1.9 metres (3 feet 11 inches to
6 feet 3 inches) long, including a tail of about 10–15 cm (4–6 in).
Weight: Males can weigh up to 160 kg (350 lb).
Females can weigh as little as 70 kg (150 lb), but can also weigh up to
125 kg (276 lb).
The average weight for adults is 100 to 115 kg (220 to 254 lb).
- The name "giant panda" is sometimes used to distinguish it from
the red panda, a neighbouring mustelid. - Though it belongs to the order Carnivora, the giant panda is a folivore,
with bamboo shoots and leaves making up more than 99% of its diet. - While the dragon has often served as China's national symbol,
internationally the giant panda has often filled this role. - As such, it is becoming widely used within China in international
contexts, for example, appearing since 1982 on gold panda
bullion coins and as one of the five Fuwa mascots of the Beijing
Olympics.
- For many decades, the precise taxonomic classification of the giant
panda was under debate because it shares characteristics with both
bears and raccoons. - However, molecular studies indicate the giant panda is a true bear,
part of the family Ursidae. - The giant panda has been referred to as a living fossil.
- The Qingling Panda, A. m. Qinlingensis, is restricted to the Qinling
mountains in Shaanxi at elevations of 1,300–3,000 m.
- The typical black and white pattern of Sichuan giant pandas is
replaced with a light brown and white pattern. - A female named Jia Jia was the oldest giant panda ever in captivity,
born in 1978 and died at an age of 38 on 16 October 2016 - A seven-year-old female named Jin Yi died in 2014 in a zoo
in Zhengzhou, China, after showing symptoms
of gastroenteritis and respiratory disease. - It was found that the cause of death was toxoplasmosis, a disease
caused by Toxoplasma gondii and infecting most warm-blooded
animals, including humans.
- The giant panda is a terrestrial animals and primarily spends its life
roaming and feeding in the bamboo forests of the Qinling
Mountains and in the hilly province of Sichuan. - Giant pandas are generally solitary.
- Pandas communicate through vocalisation and scent marking such
as clawing trees or spraying urine. - They are able to climb and take shelter in hollow trees or rock
crevices, but do not establish permanent dens. - For this reason, pandas do not hibernate, which is similar to other
subtropical mammals, and will instead move to elevations with
warmer temperatures. - Pandas rely primarily on spatial memory rather than visual memory.
- Though the panda is often assumed to be docile, it has been known
to attack humans, presumably out of irritation rather than
aggression. - Pandas have been known to cover themselves in horse manure to
protect themselves against cold temperatures. - Giant pandas reach sexual maturity between the ages of four and
eight, and may be reproductive until age 20. - The mating season is between March and May, when a female
goes into oestrus, which lasts for two or three days and only occurs
once a year. - When mating, the female is in a crouching, head-down position as
the male mounts her from behind. - The gestation period ranges from 95 to 160 days.
- Giant pandas give birth to twins in about half of pregnancies.
- If twins are born, usually only one survives in the wild.
- The mother will select the stronger of the cubs, and the weaker cub will die due to starvation.
- The mother is thought to be unable to produce enough milk for two cubs since she does not store fat.
- The father has no part in helping raise the cub.
- When the cub is first born, it is pink, blind, and toothless.
- One to two weeks after birth, the cub’s skin turns grey where its hair will eventually become black.
- Slight pink colour may appear on the cub’s fur, as a result of a chemical reaction between the fur and its mother’s saliva.
- A month after birth, the colour pattern of the cub’s fur is fully developed.
- Its fur is very soft and coarsens with age.
- The cub begins to crawl at 75 to 80 days, mothers play with their cubs by rolling and wrestling with them.
- The cubs can eat small quantities of bamboo after six months
- In the past, pandas were thought to be rare and noble creatures – the Empress Dowager Bo was buried with a panda skull in her vault.
- The grandson of Emperor Taizhong of Tang is said to have given Japan two pandas and a sheet of panda skin as a sign of goodwill.
- Unlike many other animals in Ancient China, pandas were rarely thought to have medical uses.
- The few known uses include the Sichuan tribal peoples’ use of panda urine to melt accidentally swallowed needles, and the use of panda pelts to control menstruation as described in the Qin dynasty encyclopaedia Erya.
- Microbes in panda waste are being investigated for their use in creating biofuels from bamboo and other plant materials.
- The giant panda is a vulnerable species, threatened by continued habitat loss and habitat fragmentation, and by a very low birth rate, both in the wild and in captivity.
- The giant panda has been a target of poaching by locals since ancient times and by foreigners since it was introduced to the West.
- Starting in the 1930s, foreigners were unable to poach giant pandas in China because of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, but pandas remained a source of soft furs for the locals.
- The population boom in China after 1949 created stress on the pandas’ habitat and the subsequent famines led to the increased hunting of wildlife, including pandas.
- Pandas have been kept in zoos as early as the Western Han Dynasty in China, where the writer Sima Xian guru noted that the panda was the most treasured animal in the emperor’s garden of exotic animals in the capital Chang’an (present Xi’an).
- Not until the 1950s were pandas again recorded to have been exhibited in China’s zoos.
- Chi Chi at the London Zoo became very popular
- This influenced the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to use a panda as its symbol.
- Panda tea or panda dung tea is a type of tea cultivated in the mountains of Ya’an, Sichuan and fertilized by the dung of Pandas
- The huge rise in price is mostly due to the loss in Pandas.
Meanings
Durophages – The eating behaviour of animals that consume hard-
shelled or exoskeleton bearing organisms, such as corals, shelled
molluscs, or crabs.
Gastroenteritis – An inflammation which occurs in the lining of the
intestines caused by a virus, bacteria, or parasites.
Spatial memory – A form of memory responsible for the recording
and recovery of information needed to plan a course to a location
and to recall the location of an object or the occurrence of an event.