Giant Panda

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Giant Panda
Conservation status: Endangered
Image:Panda.jpg
Hua Mei, the baby panda born at
the San Diego Zoo in 1999.
Scientific classification
Kingdom:Animalia
Phylum:Chordata
Class:Mammalia
Order:Carnivora
Family:Ursidae
Genus:Ailuropoda
Milne-Edwards, 1870
Species: A. melanoleuca
Binomial name
Ailuropoda melanoleuca
(David, 1869)

The Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca "black-and-white cat-foot") is a mammal now usually classified in the bear family, Ursidae, native to central and southern China.[1]

Easily recognizable through its large, distinctive black patches on the eyes, ears and on its rotund body, the Giant Panda is one of the most endangered animals in the world: an estimated 1,600 pandas live in the wild and some 160 of them live in captivity, according to a 2004 census. [2]

Contents

General information

The Giant Panda lives in mountainous regions, like Sichuan and Tibet. The Giant Panda is the symbol of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a conservation organization (http://www.wwf.org). Since the latter half of the 20th century, the panda has become an informal national emblem for China, and its image is found on many Chinese gold coins.

Despite being taxonomically a carnivore, their diet is overwhelmingly herbivorous. The Giant Panda eats shoots and leaves, living almost entirely on bamboo. Pandas are also known to eat eggs and some insects along with their bamboo diet. These are necessary sources of protein. Pandas find bamboo hard to digest, which leads to their feces being green in color and full of undigested bamboo.

For many decades the precise taxonomic classification of the panda was under debate as both the Giant Panda and the distantly related Red Panda share characteristics of both bears and raccoons. However, genetic testing has revealed that Giant Pandas are true bears and part of the Ursidae family. Its closest bear relative is the Spectacled Bear of South America. Disagreement remains about whether or not the Red Panda belongs in Ursidae or the raccoon family, Procyonidae.

Giant Pandas are an endangered species, threatened by continued habitat loss and by a very low birthrate, both in the wild and in captivity. About 1,600 are believed to survive in the wild.

The Giant Panda has an unusual paw, with a "thumb" and five fingers; the "thumb" is actually a modified wrist-bone. Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay about this, then used the title The Panda's Thumb for a book of collected essays. The Giant Panda has a short tail, approximately 15 cm long.

Image:Lightmatter panda.jpg

The Giant Panda was first made known to the West in 1869 by the French missionary Armand David, who received a skin from a hunter on 11 March 1869. The first westerner known to have seen a living Giant Panda is the German zoologist Hugo Weigold, who purchased a cub in 1916. Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. became the first foreigners to shoot a panda on an expedition funded by the Field Museum of Natural History in the 1920s. In 1936, Ruth Harkness became the first Westerner to bring back a live Giant Panda, a cub named Su-Lin who went to live at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.

The Giant Panda has long been a favourite of the public, at least partly on account of the fact that the species has an appealing baby-like cuteness that makes it seem to resemble a living teddy bear. The fact that it is usually depicted reclining peacefully eating bamboo, as opposed to hunting, also adds to its image of innocence. Though the Giant Panda is often assumed docile because of their cuteness they have been known to attack humans, usually assumed to be out of irritation rather than predatory behavior.

Loans of Giant Pandas to American and Japanese zoos formed an important part of the diplomacy of the People's Republic of China in the 1970s as it marked some of the first cultural exchanges between the PRC and the West. This practice has been termed "Panda Diplomacy."

By the year 1984, however, pandas were no longer used as agents of diplomacy. Instead, China began to offer pandas to other nations only on 10-year loans. The standard loan terms include a fee of up to US$1,000,000 per year and a provision that any cubs born during the loan are the property of the People's Republic of China.

In 1998 a lawsuit filed by the WWF spurred the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to require U.S. zoos seeking to import pandas to ensure that half of the fee charged by China be channeled into conservation efforts for wild pandas and their habitat before the service will issue a permit allowing the pandas to be imported.

Natural History

No fossils of pandas have been found earlier than a few million years ago. However DNA analysis of the giant panda compared with other bears show a very early split from the main bear lineage 18 or 15 million years ago. That was about the time when the so-called "dawn bear" (Ursavus) roamed the subtropics of Europe. Like a subtropical mammal, the giant panda does not hibernate. Fossils from Pleistocene sites throughout East Asia prove the success of the giant panda. In the Lang Trang caves of northern Vietnam, fossils of pandas were found - far away from the typical mountain forests where we see pandas today. Other fossils have been found as far south as Thailand and Burma, going as far north as where Beijing stands today. Fossils also show a second extinct panda species. This species, Ailuropoda minor, was half the size of the modern giant panda.

Reproduction

Giant pandas reproduce very slowly, and infant mortality is high. Growth is slow and pandas may not reach sexual maturity until they are five to seven years old. The mating season usually takes place from mid-March to mid-May. During this time, two to five males can compete for one female; the male with the highest rank gets the female. When mating, the female is in a crouching, head-down position as the male mounts from behind. Copulation time is short, ranging from thirty seconds to five minutes, but the male may mount repeatedly to ensure successful fertilization. Mating is also a very noisy time, accompanied by moaning and squealing.

The whole gestation period ranges from 83 to 163 days, with 135 days being the average. Baby pandas weigh only 90 to 130 grams, which is about 1/900th of the mother’s weight. Usually, the female panda gives birth to one or two panda cubs. Since baby pandas are born very small and helpless, they need the mother’s undivided attention, so she is only able to care for one of her cubs. She usually abandons one of her cubs, and it dies soon after birth. At this time, scientists do not know how the female chooses which cub to raise, and this is a topic of ongoing research.

The father has no part in helping with raising the cub. When the cub is first born, it is pink, naked and blind. It nurses from its mother's breast 6–14 times a day for up to 30 minutes each time. For three to four hours, the mother might leave the den to feed, which leaves the panda cub defenseless. One to two weeks after birth, the cub's skin turns gray where its hair will eventually become black. A month after birth, the color pattern of the cub’s fur is fully developed. The cub begins to crawl at 75 to 90 days and the mothers play with their cubs by rolling and wrestling with them. The cubs are able to eat small quantities of bamboo after six months, though mother's milk remains the primary food source for most of the first year. Giant panda cubs weigh 45 kilograms at one year and live with their mother until they are 18 months to two years old. The interval between births in the wild is generally two years.

On the trivial side, pandas in captivity sometimes are not successful at mating. Usually, this is due to lack of experience. In order to tackle this problem, keepers of the bears in China have been known to show "pornographic/educational" videos to the bears, the contents being pandas having sex with each other. Amazingly, the bears get stimulated by the videos. However, it is not likely that they learn from the video itself; rather, scientists believe that the audio content of excited pandas has an impact on the bears exposed to it.

Name

The name "panda" as used in the West was originally applied to the Red Panda, to which it was thought to be related. The shared name appears to derive from their common bamboo diet. Until its relation to the Red Panda was "discovered" in 1901, the Giant Panda was known as Mottled Bear (Ailuropus melanoleucus) or Parti-coloured Bear.

In Chinese, the Giant Panda is called the "large bear cat" (Simplified Chinese: 熊猫; Traditional Chinese: 熊貓; pinyin: Xióngmāo), or sometimes (usually in Taiwan) "cat bear" (Simplified Chinese: 猫熊; Traditional Chinese: 貓熊; pinyin: Māoxióng). The giant panda has had over 30,000 names in its lifetime. Since Chinese stative verbs (adjectives) are almost always placed before nouns, the latter (cat[-like] bear) is more grammatically correct. However, the former (bear, cat[-like])) is more widely-used.

Most bears' eyes have round pupils. The exception is the giant panda, whose pupils are vertical slits, like cats' eyes. These unusual eyes inspired the Chinese to call the panda the "giant cat bear."

Subspecies

Two subspecies of giant panda have been recognized on the basis of distinct cranial measurements, color patterns, and population genetics (Wan et al., 2005).

Ailuropoda melanoleuca melanoleuca consists of most extant populations of panda. These animals are principally found in Sichuan and display the typical stark black and white contrasting colors.

Ailuropoda melanoleuca qinlingensis is restricted to the Qinling Mountains in Shaanxi at elevations of 1300–3000 m. The typical black and white pattern of Sichuan pandas is replaced with a dark brown versus light brown pattern. The skull of A. m. qinlingensis is smaller than its relatives and it has larger molars.

Pandas in Popular Culture

Image:Panda Express Logo.png

Pandas are a popular animal in eastern and western culture. Pandas have often appeared in television programs, cartoons, and picture-books, while their images have graced all manner of consumer products.

  • In the webcomic PvP a giant panda attacks a character, Brent, in what has become one of the longest running jokes in the comic.
  • In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer dresses as a panda for Mr. Burns' pleasure and is subsequently mounted by a male panda at Springfield Zoo. In addition, Moe briefly runs a panda-smuggling operation from the back room of the bar. In a later episode, on a trip to China, Homer attempts to steal a panda cub, and is attacked by the mother.
  • In the popular anime/manga series Ranma ½, Ranma's father Genma Saotome suffers of a curse: he transforms into a giant panda when soaked in cold water, but can be reverted to his human form with hot water. When he is in his panda form, he expresses himself writing on a wooden board, due to his inability to speak.
  • In a chapter of the manga Great Teacher Onizuka, main character Onizuka witnesses corrupt police officer Saejima illegally importing giant pandas into Japan. Saejima tries to convince Onizuka that the pandas are really advanced robot toys.
  • Lynne Truss's book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," is a reference to a joke on poor punctuation: A panda walks into a cafe and orders a sandwich. After the panda has eaten his meal, he takes out a gun and shoots several holes in the ceiling. As the panda begins to leave, the waiter cries out, "What was that for?" in regards to the shootings. The panda tosses a wildlife guide to the waiter. The waiter reads the guide, and it says, "Panda. Black-and-white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
  • In the web comic Radioactive Panda a giant panda can be seen wearing goggles fixing machinery, miniature versions of which are used to power devices.

References

  • Wan, Q.-H., H. Wu, and S.-G. Fang. 2005. A new subspecies of giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) from Shaanxi, China. Journal of Mammalogy, 86:397–402.

Pandas in Zoos

As of 2005, four major American zoos have giant pandas (listed in order in which they acquired the pandas):

There is one zoo in Mexico, the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City:

Two zoos in Europe show giant pandas:

There are no pandas anymore in London, Madrid and Paris, although Madrid is exploring the possibility of obtaining pandas in the future.

On July 9, 2005, a male giant panda cub was born at the National Zoo to mother Mei Xiang and father Tian Tian through artificial insemination; it was the first surviving cub birth in the Zoo's history. For the first time in the nation's history, the public got to vote on this panda's name, which was announced when he turns 100 days old, following Chinese tradition. His new name is Tai Shan (tie-SHON), meaning "peaceful mountain".

A female cub was born on August 2, 2005, to the female Bai Yun and male Gao Gao at the San Diego Zoo. Bai Yun's two previous cubs were the first two giant pandas to survive past infancy in North America. The first, a female named Hua Mei, was fathered by Shi Shi via artificial insemination and was born on August 21, 1999. She returned to China in February 2004, where she has already given birth to 2 sets of twins: males in 2004 and one male/one female in 2005. Both sets of twins are doing fine to date. Bai Yun's second cub, a male named Mei Sheng, was the product of natural mating with Gao Gao and was born on August 19, 2003. The newest cub was also fathered by Gao Gao via natural mating.

Links to zoo websites:

External links

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