Giant Panda
# 8 Seed
# 8 Seed
The Giant Panda is critically endangered, which means that there are not many of them left in the world.
Lucky for them, they are under protection and are being slowly bred back to threatened.
In 2014 there were only 1,864 left in the wild. The number is small, but successful, since pandas have been slowly rising (By 17%) since the 1970's.
Some of the places helping out are the Calgary Zoo, WWF, Pandas international, and a few more.
They take donations, and you can even adopt a panda- meaning you give a certain amount of money per month, year, ect...
The giant panda has adapted(Niche) to its environment in many ways. It lives high up in the mountains in the bamboo forest in western China. In the winters it migrates down the mountain to stay warm them goes back up for spring and summer and even early fall.
The Giant Panda has many ways of which it uses to survive. It has a thick fur coat to help the colder mountain summers and the color(Black and white) helping it camouflage into the shadows and snow. Pandas also have a 6th toe so they can have better grip on bamboo and pull it out of the ground and use their strong jaws to chew through thick bamboo. Eating their meals, pandas will sit like humans and eat with their hands. Even though bamboo is their absolute favorite, they are secondary consumers and sometimes they eat other things such as grass and the small bamboo rat, but these are much more rare, mostly because they have fifth taste, which means they hate the taste of meat. Their strong legs help them climb trees when their act to scare away predators fail. They bow their head low and growl at their enemies- either a snow leopards, eating the young. Or man, hunting them for their beautiful fur- in hopes to scare them away, if all else fails they run- fast might I add- and climb a tree.
The Panda's way of communicating is with honks, snorts and even whistles, they also use scent marks, which help them determine who the other pandas are. Pandas are solitary animals most of the time, but mating has to be done with a bit of chat.
When a female panda gets pregnant, it hardly ever knows, which is why when the baby is born, the mother won't recognize it. Sometimes the mother won't even know that it has given birth and will roll on the babies and crush them in their sleep, or kill it, not thinking its hers. If the mother takes in her cubs, she becomes very playful with them to help with their future survival.
Panda's are known as secondary consumers, as well as specialists. Which means that they eat things like plants and small animals and that they don't have any predators, or very little- for example, the Giant Panda has only 2, man and the leopard.
A few fun extra facts:
The giant panda is actually a bear.
The life span of a Panda is up to 20 years in the wild.
One giant panda needs up to 4 square miles of land to properly survive.
Even though they rarely live together, when they do, its called an embarrassment.
Pandas have one of the hardest bite forces in the carnivores.
you only like pandas because they remind you of babies
baby Pandas weigh less then an iPhone.