What kind of food do giant pandas eat?

Giant pandas have lived on the earth for at least 8 million years, known as "living fossils" and "Chinese national treasures", the image ambassador of WWF, and the flagship species of biodiversity conservation in the world. According to the third national giant panda field population survey, there are less than 1600 giant pandas in the world, belonging to China's first-class protected animals. Let's take a look at what kind of food giant pandas eat.

What kind of food do giant pandas eat?

Giant pandas mainly eat bamboo. 99% of the food of giant pandas is bamboo, and there are more than 60 species of bamboo belonging to 12 genera for giant pandas to eat. In addition, wild giant pandas occasionally eat some animal carcasses or other plants. There are many kinds of bamboo that giant pandas like to eat, and arrow bamboo is only one of the more common species. These bamboos grow under the canopy of subalpine dark coniferous forest, mountain dark coniferous forest, mountain coniferous and broad-leaved forest and mountain evergreen broad-leaved forest. The distribution varies from 700 to 3500 meters above sea level, and the staple food bamboos of giant pandas in different mountain systems are different. The diet of giant pandas varies with mountains and seasons, eating different kinds of bamboo or different parts of the same kind of bamboo in different seasons. Most like to eat different kinds of bamboo shoots in spring and summer, with bamboo leaves as the staple food in autumn and bamboo stalks as the staple food in winter.

Why do giant pandas eat bamboo?

Why giant pandas eat bamboo is actually related to changes in their living environment. After the glacier attack, giant pandas left in Sichuan and Gansu can only live by gradually changing their eating habits. In the process of long-term adaptation to the environment, giant pandas change from meat to bamboo, and their molars become particularly broad, which is suitable for grinding bamboo fiber. Giant pandas like to eat cold arrow bamboo, ink bamboo, water bamboo, especially bamboo shoots, so they go somewhere on time to eat bamboo shoots every year. Eat a lot of food, eat about 20 kilograms of tender bamboo every day, absorb nutrients from a large amount of fiber, because every day to digest a lot of fiber and lignin, so it especially likes to drink water. Of course, giant pandas occasionally eat other small animals, such as when they see bamboo rats, they slap them to death, and then have a good meal. Giant pandas usually eat, sleep, wake up and start eating again. Because bamboo has its rise and fall cycle, about 50-60 years after flowering, the giant panda dies after flowering, which makes the giant panda lack of food and threaten its life. At present, China has established a giant panda reserve, and at the same time, it has also organized large-scale rescue activities for giant pandas and carried out artificial breeding to make this "national treasure" last forever.

Do giant pandas eat a lot?

Giant pandas eat a lot. Giant pandas still retain the relatively simple digestive tract of carnivores, without the complex stomach and huge cecum that herbivores have for storing food, and there are no symbiotic bacteria or ciliates used to ferment cellulose in plants into nutrients that can be absorbed. The only way to get the nutrition they need is to eat fast and pull as fast as they can. A 100 kg adult giant panda In spring, it takes 12 to 16 hours a day to eat 10 to 18 kilograms of bamboo leaves and stalks, or 30 to 38 kilograms of fresh bamboo shoots, while excreting more than 10 kilograms of feces in order to maintain metabolic balance.