810-Lmcaster Farming, Saturday, March 15,1986
China's pandas
peace to
WASHINGTON - Can the panda
be saved? Of course, says zoologist
George B. Schaller. “All it needs is
bamboo and peace.”
Therein lie the difficulties facing
China’s giant panda. Hunting and
destruction of its bamboo forest
habitat have drastically shrunk the
animal’s range so that more than
half of the estimated 1,000 sur
vivors live in 12 reserves in
southern China. And bamboo is
becoming scarce and susceptible
to die-offs that starve pandas.
Strangely, the panda prefers
meat, and has the simple stomach
and short intestines of a carnivore.
But meat is hard for the relatively
slow panda to obtain, and so it
relies on bamboo - loads of it.
Eats Huge Volumes
Unable to digest bamboo’s
nutrients efficiently, a panda eats
large volumes - 22 to 40 pounds of
leaves and stems a day. When on a
diet of bamboo shoots, which are 90
percent water, a panda may
consume some 650 shoots weighing
85 pounds daily.
the tally of shoots was made by
Schaller, director of Wildlife
Conservation International, New
York Zoological Society, as part of
a five-year study by China and the
World Wildlife Fund in Wolong
Natural Reserve. The research
team, led by Schaller and Hu
Jinchu, radio-collared 11 pandas to
track their activities.
Schaller and his wife, Kay,
sometimes endured below-freezing
winters in a two-person tent per
ched high on a ridge. Writing in the
March issue of National
Geographic, he recalls: “In the
glow of a kerosene lantern I tune
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the receiver to Long-Long, a young
male. He is on my right, down
slope, active. I switch the radio
frequency to Ning-Ning...Her
signal is calm and consant, the
animal momentarily at rest in a
ravine not far frond Long-Long...”
“Then I recline,” writes
Schaller, “waiting until it its time
to contact the pandas again, each
alone in that cold stillness, their
coats the color of snow and the
darkness between trees. I cannot
imagine a loneliness deeper than
theirs.”
Despite daily expeditions,
Schaller observed a panda only on
the average of once a month. Over
time he determined that the home
range of a panda is very small,
varying from 1.6 to 2.6 square
miles, and is shared with other
pandas.
Although the ranges of neigh
boring females may overlap, each
has an area of about 75 to 100 acres
in which other females do not seem
welcome. Males may share ranges
but avoid each other except when
competing for females. The
animals are active for an average
of 14 hours a day, spending most of
the time feeding.
Though the first live panda
didn’t reach the western world
until 1936, pandas have been known
in China for millennia. “The
Classics of Sea and Mountains,” a
geography book dating back some
2,500 years, says that a “bearlike,
black-and-white animal that eats
copper and iron lives in the
Qionglai Mountains south of
Yandao County.”
Chews Cooking Pots
The panda’s reputation as an
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Sporting a radio collar fitted by scientists, a giant panda leaves a log trap in Wolong
Natural Reserve in China's Sichuan Province. Scientists had weighed and measured the
panda and then activated the collar so the animal could be monitored 24 hours a day.
Some pandas were tracked more than a year.
iron eater probably comes from
incidents of entering villages and
chewing up cooking pots. Pandas
get their ability to chew metal-as
well as tough bamboo-from
massive jaws and broad molars.
Teeth of fossil pandas 3 million
years old are similar to those of
today’s animals, showing that the
pact between panda and bamboo
has existed probably as long as
pandas have.
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Bamboo foraging is aided by
another feature-a unique sixth
digit on the panda’s forepaw that
affords great dexterity.
Some traits work against pan
das. Gestation is long, apparently
because of delayed implantation of
the fertilized egg. And when they
do give birth, usually to two cubs,
one cub generally is abandoned
and left to die.
The nurturing of young pandas in
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the wild can be as mysterious ai
uncertain as births in captivit
Schaller and his colleagues c
served a panda known as Zhe
Zhen mate in April 1981, and th
later found she had made a den
fhe hollow base of a huge fir tree.
When the scientists approach)
the den in October, a startled Zhe
Zhen lumbered toward thei
screaming. Later they heard
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