Do giant pandas eat meat?

The giant panda belongs to a mammal of the family Pandas of the carnivorous order, with black and white body, round cheeks, big black circles, chubby body, iconic eight-character walking style and scalpel-sharp claws. It is one of the cutest animals in the world. Let's take a look at whether giant pandas eat meat or not.

Do giant pandas eat meat?

Giant pandas eat meat. Giant pandas initially eat meat, but also have the potential of predators to eat meat, but rarely eat animals or animal carcasses, this is not that it does not like to eat meat, but the lack of opportunities. Because in the distribution area of giant pandas, there are few large carnivores, and there are not many carcasses left for him to eat. If you often catch small animals such as mice, the nutrition you get is often not enough to compensate for the energy consumed. As a result, giant pandas can only eat a little meat occasionally, and most of the time they rely on bamboo step by step to maintain their life, and become animals that follow the rules and live according to bamboo all their lives.

What kind of food do giant pandas eat?

Pandas 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 have long grown under the canopy of subalpine dark coniferous forest, mountain dark coniferous forest, mountain coniferous and broad-leaved mixed forest and mountain evergreen broad-leaved forest. The distribution varies from 700 to 3500 meters above sea level. 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.