10 Adorable Facts about Giant Pandas

Giant pandas are arguably the world's cutest animals. Scientists believe their oversized heads, cute little noses, and toddling gates (they can even somersault) remind us human infants, which can elicit "oohs" and "aahs" from even the most hard-hearted of us. Learn more and brighten your day with these interesting giant panda facts.

1. A group of giant pandas is called an “embarrassment.”

2. Female giant pandas are fertile just 3 days during the year.

3. The giant panda’s scientific name is Ailuropoda melanoleuca, which means “black and white cat-foot.”

4. According to many Chinese philosophers, the gentle panda’s black and white coloring demonstrates how the two opposing forces in nature, the yin and the yang, bring peace and harmony when they are balanced.

5. A giant panda mother is 900 times bigger than her newborn cub, which weighs less than 5 oz. In comparison, an 8-pound human baby would have a mother that weighed 7,200 pounds.

6. A giant panda’s face is cute, but it is not chubby. It gets its shape from massive cheek muscles, which give it a more powerful bite than both a lion and a tiger.

7. Giant pandas do not hibernate because their bamboo diet will not allow them to build up enough fat reserves for the winter.

8. Much of the food that a giant panda eats is not digested. An adult giant panda in the spring can produce about 62 pounds of droppings in 24 hours.

9. Keeping even a single giant panda in a zoo is expensive. A giant panda costs five times more to keep than the next most expensive animal, an elephant.

10. Giant pandas are on the brink of extinction, with just over 1,000 pandas left in the world. They are the most rare bear species.

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[indyreno]

These animals are called giant pandas not pandas.

[garymoh]

The #10 Fact is totally outdated.
Base on based on census in 2014, there were about 1, 864 giant pandas alive in the wild, an increase by 17 percent since the last census, therefore panda had been upgraded from endangered to vulnerable. And captive panda population as of Dec 2018 stand at 548.

There are also a rare subspecies called Qinling Panda whereby the wild population is about 345 during 2018 census, some time this subspecies may appear the so called Brown Panda whereby it will have brown patches instead of black patches. A research center has been established dedicated to the study of the Qinling Panda just last year & it will help on the conservation of this even rarer panda.

Another fact, usually panda in the wild will only raise one cub per pregnancy and will abandon the other/s if they are twin or triplet. But with human intervention for the captive population, we could save all of them. Therefore they are breeding faster than in the wild.

To ensure Panda genetics diversity and number in both captive & wild pandas, some captive pandas are raised in a control fenced up forest so to assess them whether they could survive in the wild without any human intervention. If they are ready, they will be released into one of the nature reserve where the number of wild panda is low, so to ensure their survivability and also to maintain genetics diversity in these wild population. So far at least 9 captive panda were released and 7 have survived.

Some female pandas were also released so to mate with their wild counterpart and then recaptured the pregnant pandas after the mating season so their offspring will increase the genetics diversity in the captive population as well.

Wild pandas face the danger of earthquake, flooding, disease and bamboo flowering where all the bamboo of the same species will die in the area which will be devastating to the wild population in that affected area. So having a captive population will help to repopulate the wild stock.