Giant pandas are an animal we are familiar with, even if you haven't seen them, but you must have heard of them. It is our national treasure, which is found in zoos in many cities, while the wild ones are mainly distributed in the southwest hinterland and the Qinling Mountains.
In fact, for the cognition of giant pandas, the Internet is divided into two factions, some people believe that the giant panda is ultimately a bear, fierce and dangerous. Others are "deceived" by the appearance of giant pandas, thinking that they are chubby, eat or sleep all day, look harmless to humans and animals, and are a very weak animal.
If you think the same way, then you are wrong, in fact, the giant panda is a very fierce animal, it can even nibble on the bones of antelope and kill goats with its bare hands.
A brief history of the evolution of giant pandas
Since its evolution, giant pandas have developed to feed mainly on bamboo, and 99% of their diet is composed of various types of bamboo.
Feeding on this food with extremely low nutritional value and poor palatability not only allows giant pandas to avoid competition with all carnivores, but also to avoid direct competition with the vast majority of herbivores, and in nature, only a small number of animals feed on bamboo.
However, although the giant pandas are mainly vegetarian, they still retain the specialized equipment of meat eating, including fangs and claws and digestive system. And you know what? The ancestors of giant pandas are pure carnivores.
According to the international mainstream view, the ancestors of giant pandas can be traced back to the late Miocene, that is, 8 million years ago, when there was a small carnivore called "The First Panda" living on the earth.
It didn't look very similar to a modern giant panda, with a body similar to that of an obese fox, with sharp teeth and claws, and fed on some of the small animals that lived on the earth at that time.
In the late Pleistocene, a small species of giant panda appeared, which was closer to the modern giant panda than the first panda, and its weight also increased considerably, about half that of modern giant pandas. In the stage of small species of giant pandas, they have evolved to feed mainly on bamboo.
In the middle and late Pleistocene, the Baba giant panda evolved, and in the Pasteur's giant panda stage, the giant panda family developed to its peak, and its distribution range not only included most of the mainland, but even extended to Vietnam and Myanmar.
Pasteurized pandas are more like beasts of prey than modern pandas, and they are huge in size. However, from the fossil bones of Pasteurized Pandas excavated from some prehistoric human sites, there are rough cut marks on them, indicating that humans at that time would prey on Pasteur's pandas.
The evolution to the modern giant panda stage is the fourth stage, in this stage, the giant panda almost gave up meat, the appearance gradually became cute, making human beings "addicted".
The giant panda bites amazingly hard
Although modern giant pandas give people a harmless appearance, they are actually limited to individuals in zoos and locked up, and wild pandas are still very fierce.
The first is that they are not small in weight, more than most animals. In the animal world, body size often represents combat strength, and poor body size is poor combat strength. Giant pandas weigh 100-115 kg as adults, similar to lazy bears.
As for the lazy bear, there is a video on the Internet that is very popular, which occurred in the Tadoba Andari Tiger Reserve in India, and it will defeat the Bengal tiger with the "king of the hundred beasts", which shows that the combat effectiveness of the bears is not weak.
The giant panda has the nickname of "iron-eating beast", which means that its bite force is quite strong, even comparable to the largest bear, the polar bear.
Although this statement is suspected of exaggeration, after all, there are many factors affecting the bite force, such as weight is a very important factor, and the weight of giant pandas is far from being comparable to that of polar bears.
However, it is true that the bite force of giant pandas is amazing, between different species, the bite force can not be directly compared, so the academic community often introduces the concept of "bite force quotient", we simply understand it as a unit of bite force, so that the bite force between different species can be compared horizontally.
According to a research paper published in the journal Life Sciences by zoologist Stephen Rowe of the University of Sydney, the bite force quotient of brown bears is 78, the bite force quotient of Asian black bears is 44, and the bite force quotient of tigers is 127, which translates to 1225N for a tiger with 186.9 kg.
Giant pandas have a canine tooth bite quotient of up to 142, surpassing most animals. The strong bite force allows the giant panda to easily nibble on the bamboo, so it is not too exaggerated to be called an "iron-eating beast".
Go down the hill to hunt sheep and be photographed nibbling on antelope bones
What has been described above is basically theoretical knowledge, and practice is often the only way to test truth. Don't look at them "bulky", in fact, giant pandas have hunting ability, in addition to occasionally preying on bamboo rats to beat the tooth sacrifice, giant pandas can also hunt large animals.
For example, the sensational "illegal killing of giant pandas" incident in 2014 was caused by the giant pandas preying on the sheep in the villagers' homes; coincidentally, in February 2017, a giant panda in Mabian County, Leshan, Sichuan Province, also preyed on a sheep from the villagers after descending the mountain.
In addition to direct sheep hunting, in 2021, rangers from Shaanxi Foping National Nature Reserve discovered a rare sight of giant pandas gnawing on bones during the winter DaqingShan.
At that time, a giant panda was "sitting" on the mountainside 50 meters away from people, there was no bamboo around, but it was holding something in its hand and eating it. On closer inspection, it turned out to be an antelope bone more than a foot long.
However, people have not observed the giant panda preying on the antelope, given the large size and irritability of the antelope, coupled with the giant panda's habit of not moving, so it is likely that it picked up the bone.
In fact, this is no longer the phenomenon that giant pandas have been found eating antelope bones, as early as November 2014, people found a similar phenomenon.
Some studies on the analysis of giant panda feces have also found bone remains of other animals in a stool sample, as many as 20 pieces, indicating that giant pandas are not just vegetarian. Therefore, the evaluation of giant pandas should be objective, their appearance is cute and not false, but the other side is a beast, which is also a fact.