PandaBFTB

mengqi

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he iconic giant panda is unique: it has no close relatives in the animal world. But despite becoming a symbol of wildlife conservation, having narrowly avoided extinction, there are fewer than 2000 giant pandas alive today.

This spectacular celebration of our best-loved bear combines the expertise of the foremost panda conservationists with an extraordinary collection of previously unseen photographs by the world’s leading photographer of pandas in the wild. Catch a rare glimpse of this shy creature at home in the remote mountain wilderness of Sichuan, and peek inside the nursery at the Wolong research institution where efforts to save the panda have been bearing fruit.

pa n da

pa n p adna d a b a c k fbraoc mk f r o m t h e b rti h n ke b r i n k

zhou mengqi

Cover photos © Zhou Mengqi

sales of this book support the pandas in edinburgh at the royal zoological society of scotland

‘Exquisite. A suitably stunning tribute to this incredible and much-misunderstood bear.’ henry nicholls, author

of The Way of the Panda

zhou mengqi introduction by

i a i n va l e n t i n e

Opposite: Pandas can grip bamboo using a special pseudo-thumb.

The fossil record suggests that the panda then continued evolving, growing gradually as time went on, to reach its present bulk approximately half a million years ago.

Through all of these ups and downs in size, however, the panda remained essentially the same animal in anatomical terms, which is stranger than it may at first appear. Indeed, evolution moves in mysterious ways in the case of the panda, considering that far-reaching changes may have been expected in a mammal whose digestive system seems more or less entirely at odds with the way that it has lived through countless generations.

even though the cellulose-rich bamboo that it eats is even tougher than grass (bamboo is more like wood in texture). Granted, the panda’s digestive system is robustly engineered for physical toughness, the inside of its mouth and throat being as durable as seasoned leather, providing protection from injury as the tough bamboo is swallowed. The bamboo’s passage is eased, too, by the secretion of copious amounts of lubricating mucus in the panda’s gut. The stomach is also very strong, its thick walls being resistant to splinters. Nevertheless, it is a single, simple stomach that has no special enzymes to assist in the processing of so much cellulose; instead, it relies entirely on its own acid.

a c o n t r a ry ca r n i vo r e The panda is classed as a carnivore, a member of the zoological order Carnivora. At the same time, however (and it’s a well-known fact – indeed, one of the best-known facts that there is about the giant panda), it subsists almost entirely on bamboo, which makes up 99 per cent of its diet. From a dietary point of view, at least, this means that the panda has much more in common with grazing mammals (ruminants) than with other Ursidae. That said, most members of the Ursidae family are prepared to compromise their carnivorous habits, and only the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is anything like exclusively meat-eating.

Yet when the other Ursidae turn to plant foods, they tend to favour the more readily digested kinds, like fruit and nuts. The panda could hardly be more different in its diet, and even most specialist herbivores would struggle to extract adequate nutrition from bamboo.

Typically, mammals that eat grasses, stems and other highly fibrous foods process them a stage at a time, through a series of separate stomachs or stomach chambers. Digestion for grazing animals begins in the fore-stomach, or rumen. Here, special enzymes set about breaking down the cellulose that forms the bulk of what’s been eaten. Cows famously chew the cud, part-digesting grass in a fore-stomach before bringing it back into the mouth to chew again, gradually reducing it to a form in which it can be properly digested and its nutrients extracted. Sheep and goats do the same, as do a great many other wild ruminants: everything from antelope and deer through buffalo and bison to giraffes.

The giant panda has no such sophisticated digestive equipment. It just has the straightforward single stomach of its carnivore ancestors,

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rule of thumb One evolutionary anatomical adaptation that has reflected the panda’s lifestyle is the development of a thumb, allowing it to hold on to springy bamboo stalks as it chews. Strictly speaking, this appendage isn’t really a thumb – it’s an unusual outgrowth of bone and tendon – but it takes on some of the functions that a primate’s thumb performs.

The panda’s ‘thumb’ is actually what is known as a sesamoid bone: rather than belonging structurally to the skeleton, it is embedded within a tendon, giving it resilience, whilst allowing it to move freely. Such bones are typically to be found at the body’s joints, where flexibility is needed, but strength has to be maintained at the same time. (The human patella, or kneecap, is an example; so, too, are the metatarsals that govern the movement of the toes.)

In the giant panda, an elongated sesamoid bone branches out to one side of the paw, beside the digits proper. This would have helped the panda’s ancestors to articulate the wrist. It has evolved – and grown – a long way since then, however: although it has reduced movement, it now works as an opposable thumb (like the human one), providing an anchoring point against which clutching claws can hold a bamboo stem or other objects.

Above: Even a hard-bitten naturalist like Père Armand David wasn’t immune to the engaging appeal of the panda, a new species to him, and one that he described as being ‘easily the most pretty I have come across’.

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Left and above: It’s hard for us to imagine anything more winningly winsome than a young panda, with its air of comic melancholy. Yet nineteenth-century naturalists had no qualms about collecting panda skins.

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Opposite: The giant panda has gigantic appetites, and not just for eating, but also for drinking. Fortunately, its mountain environment is rich in running water.

making a splash

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HE MORE WE LEARN OF THE PANDA’S PRIVATE LIFE, THE LESS CUTE AND ENGAGING, and the more curmudgeonly, it seems. Self-sufficient for months – or even years – at a time, a grudging partner, an absent father or (after an intense few months) an increasingly indifferent mother, the panda is more of a cold fish than a cuddly teddy bear in many important respects. So how are we to hold on to the cheery panda stereotype? Is there nothing to redeem this killjoy? There’s no arguing with the blotchy, black-and-white beauty of the beast, with its luxuriant fur and wonderfully anthropomorphic face, but it would still be nice to feel that there was an engaging panda personality to match. In the longer term, it may be hard for us to maintain our enthusiasm for the panda when everything that we discover about it seems to cast cold water on our cherished misconceptions.

a sense of fun

d r i v e n to d r i n k

Actually, on the subject of cold water, if you want to see the panda’s more appealing side, there’s nothing better than providing it with a bath or plunge pool, as zoos around the world have found. Pandas – old, as well as young – take evident delight in frolicking in water, rolling about and splashing around in it with the utmost abandon. For reasons that we don’t yet understand, females approaching oestrus take special pleasure in playing in water, so it often has a role in the preliminary rituals of courtship.

Why this love of water? In one sense, there’s no great mystery about it: keeping clean and cool are clearly significant factors. There’s also an obvious survival value in being able to swim across the hill country’s rushing rivers, whether to escape from danger or to seek out new food sources. Do pandas romp and play in water for the sheer fun of it? Or are they really (albeit perhaps unconsciously) just regulating their temperatures and maintaining their life skills?

How far should we see their fun as functional? That is ultimately a philosophical question, and one that could just as easily be asked of human beings. Regardless, pandas certainly give every indication of having a good time as they splash about in water.

The panda’s appreciation of water isn’t all about fun, however we define it. For pandas have to drink, just as we do. All animals need water: it’s essential both to the body’s composition and to its daily functioning. The panda needs more than most, however, for digestive reasons. We’ve already seen that their stomachs are strikingly ill-suited to their diet: in fact, they manage to digest only 20 to 30 per cent of what pandas eat. That leaves, to put it bluntly, an enormous amount of waste. We can’t put a precise figure on quite how much, but experts have estimated that an adult panda defecates about fifty times a day.

(Panda droppings are green in colour, which is not really surprising, given that they are made up of bamboo shoots that have been barely modified by an inefficient digestive process.)

A great deal of water is inevitably lost along with so much excreted cellulose – indeed, the defecation process itself requires a lot of lubricating. Bamboo is in any case high in water content – especially the tender young shoots favoured by the panda, which contain up to 90 per cent – but there’s nevertheless a constant danger of dehydration, hence the panda’s need to drink – and drink, and drink, and drink some more, often in apparently preposterously large quantities. Local villagers joke that the

a home in the hills

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p l ac e s o f sa f e t y In 1963, the first officially ordained sanctuary for wild pandas was accordingly designated at Wolong, in western Sichuan’s Qionglai Mountains. The national nature reserve here extended over 200km2 of unspoiled upland, which the Chinese authorities were determined should remain unspoiled. So just as panda-poaching was policed, so, too, economic development was severely curbed: Wolong was to be preserved, as far as possible, in its pristine state.

Further protection areas were established during the decades that followed in the Qionglai and Jiajin Mountains region. Today, Wolong is just the centrepiece of a collectively administered group of reserves

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and ‘scenic parks’ known as the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries – a UNESCO World Heritage site. However, this protection could not guard against the considerable natural damage caused by the large Chengdu earthquake in 2008.

There are also other protected areas further afield, most notably, perhaps, the Foping National Nature Reserve in Shaanxi’s Qinling Mountains, which was designated as such in 1978 and covers 35km2.

Altogether, China now has around fifty reserves, which extend over more than 1 million hectares in total and take in 45 per cent of the panda’s known habitat and more than 60 per cent of its world population.

Above: Of over 300 pandas successfully reared in captivity, most were born and raised at Sichuan’s Panda Breeding and Research Centre in Chengdu.

Left: At Chengdu, many of the young pandas are parent-reared, and the success rate of the breeding programme has increased by incubating the twin of the parentreared offspring. (In the wild, only one twin would normally survive.)

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