The famous giant panda can be described as a household name. Big dark circles, thick fur, round flat face, a cute, cute and cute appearance, captured a large number of "loyal love powder", in the zoo, just by selling cute and eating bamboo, it has earned enough popularity.
The soft and cute appearance makes many people mistakenly think that the panda is very docile, however, the "national treasure" that makes a living by selling cuteness on weekdays is quite fierce in nature.
Take a look at this statistical picture of giant panda injuries from 2000 to 2016.
Giant pandas, which seem harmless to humans and animals, are actually beasts of prey. In ancient times, people ranked the ferocity of the giant panda with that of the tiger, and also called it an "iron-eating beast". So, how did the fierce giant panda become a rare and endangered animal and become a "national treasure" of our country? Let's take a look at the past and present lives of giant pandas.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > the evolution of giant pandas</h1>
Giant pandas belong to mammals, carnivorous orders, bear families, have lived on the earth for nearly ten million years, known as the "living fossils" of the animal kingdom.
As early as 8 million years ago in the late Middle Ages, there were already traces of giant pandas on the earth, its ancestors were called "first pandas", mainly distributed in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and other places in China, is a kind of carnivore, mainly by hunting other animals for a living.
The first panda of digital restoration
3 million years ago, with the advent of the Ice Age, global climate change affected the survival of the ancestral panda, resulting in the extinction of the panda. The first panda evolved into two branches: one is the suburban panda distributed in Europe (extinct), and the other is a small species of giant panda distributed in the central and southern regions of China.
After the small species of giant panda adapted to the subtropical climate, the habitat also expanded, and after its extinction, the pasteurized panda was connected, and gradually spread to the Yangtze River Basin, the Pearl River Basin and parts of North China, and even extended to parts of Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand, and gradually evolved into a typical subtropical giant panda in South China.
At that time, there were saber-toothed tigers, saber-toothed elephants and other large species living with giant pandas, and with the arrival of the Quaternary ice age, the earth's environment underwent tremendous changes, saber-toothed tigers and saber-toothed elephants all became extinct, and giant pandas survived and went so far with humans.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > giant panda's past life - a predatory beast</h1>
Don't think that the giant panda looks docile and kind, don't treat it as a beast, the giant panda is a "bear", not a "cat", and is "related" to the famous polar bear and brown bear.
Through the study of panda fossils, scientists have found that the giant panda family is a carnivore, and its ancestors are omnivores, which can live in the same period as large carnivores such as saber-toothed tigers and saber-toothed elephants.
Giant pandas have sharp teeth and very powerful molars, and the bite force of the teeth is very terrible, ranking fifth among carnivores, the top four are polar bears, tigers, brown bears, and lions.
Carnivores bite force ranking
In many ancient sources, people refer to giant pandas as "iron-eating beasts".
The Divine Scripture describes it as follows: In the south, there are beasts, the size of horns and feet is shaped like a buffalo, the fur is black as lacquer, the food and water are iron, and its dung can be used as a weapon, and its sharpness is like steel, which is called "iron".
It is also mentioned in the Classic of Mountains and Seas that this beast eats iron and copper, and does not eat other things.
Sima Qian believed in the "Chronicle of the Five Emperors" that giant pandas have sharp teeth and chew copper and iron, and they are undoubtedly beasts.
In fact, the reason why the ancients thought that the giant panda was an "iron-eating beast" was because after entering the winter, the mountain food was scarce, and when the giant panda foraged near the village, it nibbled on the villagers' agricultural tools (axes, knives, etc.) or cooking utensils (iron pots and copper basins, etc.), and the name "iron-eating beast" spread like this.
However, it was found that the "iron-eating beast" was not a figment, and in August 1981, a 7-year-old female giant panda Lily in the Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province actually bitten the iron basin containing food into pieces and swallowed it into her stomach.
A milk basin for a one-year-old panda cub
This is the milk basin of modern baby pandas, and they are about to be licked out of shape...
In addition to the amazing bite force, the giant panda's attack power is not inferior, mainly relying on sharp bear claws to open the bow left and right, even lions and tigers do not dare to easily provoke it, a big slap to kill a buffalo is as simple as a human pinching an ant.
Giant panda's paws
An adult wild giant panda has almost no natural enemies, has an absolute hegemonic position in the territory, black bears, wolves, golden leopards and other ferocious animals do not dare to confront it head-on, by the giant panda's bear paw, even if the life is saved, it will fall into a "seriously injured" end.
Sharp teeth and sharp claws are the giant panda's powerful "weapons", if the strength is not against the opponent, the giant panda also has a "killer skill" to save his life - climbing trees.
Climbing trees is one of the survival instincts of giant pandas. Once there is a danger to life, it will whizz to climb a tree more than twenty meters high, although the tree climbing ability is not as good as the monkey, but avoiding predators is not a problem at all!
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > Giant Panda In This Life - China's "National Treasure"</h1>
Giant pandas have been endemic to China since ancient times, living in alpine dense forests for a long time, and are good at hiding, the ancients did not know much about it, and even did not value this chubby guy.
Around the 1870s, Western explorers learned that there was a rare "new species" in The Sichuan region of China, so they came to China to carry out hunting activities, and successively brought them abroad, and the "panda fever" swept the world.
The hunting behavior of Western explorers has attracted attention from the Chinese people, and in the 1940s, the Chinese government began to restrict the hunting activities of foreigners. At this time, the giant panda was quite popular abroad, and after the Chinese government came forward to protect it, its status at home also rose again and again.
Until 1988, the giant panda officially became a "national treasure" of China and was listed as a national level 1 key protected wild animal.
No matter how powerful the giant panda itself is, it cannot withstand the hunting of modern human weapons, coupled with the continuous destruction of natural habitats, the living space is getting smaller and smaller, and it has gradually become an endangered species.
It is undeniable that although the giant panda population is endangered and has its own low reproductive ability (difficulty in estrus, difficulty in breeding and conception, difficulty in surviving cubs, etc.), pandas that have lived for millions of years have not been eliminated by nature, and the sharp decline in numbers today is inseparable from what humans do.
Earlier we mentioned that the giant panda is a carnivorous beast, but now the dietary habits have undergone earth-shaking changes, 99% of the diet is bamboo, since when did the giant panda become less fond of meat?
Scientists have studied the tooth structure of small species of giant pandas and concluded that during the period of small species of giant pandas, the panda family evolved into omnivorous animals, and the habit of eating bamboo has been developed since then.
Nowadays, giant pandas eat bamboo for a living, but they still retain the characteristics of carnivores in the digestive system, and they are not completely vegetarian on weekdays, and occasionally eat meat.
Because bamboo is not easy to digest and absorb, and the nutrition is low, giant pandas spend nearly 14 hours a day "nibbling on bamboo", don't look at the "national treasure" skin is thick and fat, in fact, the fat content in people's bodies is very low.
As for why giant pandas have become only fond of eating bamboo, biologists have also conducted in-depth research and proposed a variety of hypotheses, the more convincing are the following two:
First, some scientists believe that in the process of evolution, the giant panda has mutated the taste gene, lost the gene called T1R1, and has been eating meat and tasteless since then;
Second, some scientists believe that it is because of the insufficient metabolic capacity of dopamine in the giant panda, and bamboo contains a certain substance to compensate for this defect.
Human domesticated giant pandas, wild and aggressive greatly reduced, every day in addition to eating bamboo, is to climb trees, sleep, and live in the wild giant pandas, or quite fierce, after all, to run for daily life to work hard.
At present, there are a total of 1864 wild giant pandas in China, and the number of captive populations has exceeded 600.
After humans began to consciously protect their habitats, the number of giant pandas increased, but the status quo of the population is still not very optimistic, and the road to rewilding and repatriation is still a long way to go.
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