A giant panda is a bear that lives on a plant. Giant pandas are bears with black-and-white fur. In Chinese, the giant panda's name means "large bear cat," and it is also called the bamboo bear. About 99 percent of a giant panda's diet is bamboo. Besides bamboo, giant pandas sometimes eat other plants and small animals. Adults are about 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to 1.8 meters) long, and a giant panda is about as big as an American black bear.
Why is bamboo such hard work? You might expect a plant eater to have a plant eater's gut. A giant panda's digestive system is like a meat-eater's, so it digests bamboo poorly. It takes in only about one-fifth or less of the nutrients in the bamboo it eats. Bamboo does not give much nourishment, so a giant panda must eat a great deal of it, and it spends 10 to 16 hours of every day finding and eating food.
Watch a giant panda at a meal. It usually sits upright to eat, which leaves its front paws free to hold bamboo. Its "thumb" is really an enlarged wrist bone covered by a pad of skin, not a true finger, yet it grips bamboo with it like a thumb. Strong jaws and flat back teeth crush the tough stalks. A giant panda eats at least 20 pounds of food every day.
A panda's eating begins with milk. A newborn giant panda cub is about the size of a stick of butter, and it weighs only about 3 to 5 ounces. It is blind and helpless. A cub opens its eyes when it is about 6 to 8 weeks old. It cannot move around on its own until it is about three months old. A cub drinks its mother's milk for most of its first year.
Wild giant pandas live in the mountains of China, in only three provinces: Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. Their forests lie between about 5,000 and 10,000 feet above sea level. The mountain forests are wet and misty, and a thick, woolly coat keeps a giant panda warm in them. Giant pandas have lived in the bamboo forests of China for several million years. A giant panda home needs at least two kinds of bamboo. When bamboo flowers and dies off in an area, pandas can run short of food.
Words to know
- digestive: breaking down food
- nutrients: body-building goodness
- nourishment: food's goodness
- provinces: regions of China
- upright: straight up
