PANDAS By:Alexandra Deng
Habitat Giant pandas are among the rarest creatures in the world. They are now only found in the wild in Southeastern China, specifically in the Minshan and Qinling mountains. There, they can enjoy their preferred cool, damp environment. Only 45% of the population of giant pandas live in the wild, as there are 27 panda reserves to protect them. The Minshan and Qinling mountains also have a good amount of bamboo, which is the main part of a panda s diet.
Diet Giant pandas eat a scary amount of bamboo, as it takes up over 99% of their diet. They may eat up to 40 pounds of bamboo a day, which is about 40% of their own weight. They cannot fatten up enough to hibernate through the winter. However, they also eat birds, fish, and various rodents when they can get it, and do seem to like honey. They may also eat grass, herbs, vines, and roots. They can even eat flowers, if they are available in the spring.
Diet (cont.) Even though giant pandas are omnivores, their digestive system is more like the one of a carnivore's than a herbivore's. Bamboo has many toxins and even poisons in it, and giant pandas are one of the only animals that can eat and digest it. Bamboo is also hard, rough, and sometimes spiky. That is why a giant panda s cheek teeth are 7 times as big as ours. They use their strong teeth to strip off the hard outer covering of a bamboo stalk, and eat the softer pith inside. Giant pandas actually have five fingers, plus a special thumb that is not a thumb at all. It is actually a wrist bone called a radial sesamoid that acts like a thumb to help them handle bamboo. The inside of their stomach is covered in mucus to keep bamboo from harming it. Even though the body of a giant panda is a giant machine for crushing bamboo, they do prefer to eat tender bamboo shoots and leaves when they can find them.
Habits In addition to the 14 hours a day that giant pandas spend eating, the rest of the day is full of naps. They are expert tree climbers, and may not look like it, but are good swimmers. Their fur looks soft, but it is stiff and coarse. They have two-colored skin; under the white fur the skin is pink, and under the black fur the skin is black. Also, pandas do not live together. Grown ones have scent glands under their tail that produces a stinky, waxy substance to mark their territory. They do mate, but after the cubs are born, the female actually chases the male from her territory, and she raises the cubs alone.
Panda Cubs At birth, a giant panda is blind, deaf, pink, helpless, and the size of a hotdog. They are six inches long and weigh 4 ounces. Their mothers are about 900 times as big as them, and can easily crush them to death. They are almost completely bare except for a thin coat of white hair. In the wild, cubs are raised in dens. Sometimes, a mother gives birth to twins. She can only take care of one cub herself, so reserves and zoos take care of the other. A panda cub nurses for 18 months. As they grow, cubs grow their fur coat, and then they can keep warm on their own. When baby pandas are 3 months old, they start to crawl. When they are 5 months old, they can climb. By a year old, they grow their adult teeth and start to eat bamboo.
The Red Panda Red pandas share the giant panda s name, and the love for bamboo. They do not have any close relatives, though scientists used to think that they were most closely related to the racoon. They also have the giant panda s special thumb. Most of their diet consists of bamboo, but they will eat vines, roots, fruit, and occasionally a rotten egg or bird. Males are territorial. Females have 1-4 cubs at a time, but they usually have twins.
Works Cited Wwf.panda.org www.chinahighlights.com/pandas http://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/redpandas Pandas By John Bonnett Wexo How Many Baby Pandas? By Sandra Markle
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