Stephanie S's List: Alison's Animal Report

• A wild giant panda’s diet is almost exclusively (99 percent)   bamboo. The balance consists of other grasses and occasional   small rodents or musk deer fawns. In zoos, giant pandas eat   bamboo, sugar cane, rice gruel, a special high-fiber biscuit,   carrots, apples, and sweet potatoes.
• • What Pandas Eat

• in the misty, rainy mountains of southwestern China
• • Pandas are Endangered
• Only about 1,000 of these black-and-white relatives of bears survive in the wild. Pandas eat almost nothing but bamboo shoots and leaves.
• Pandas eat fast, they eat a lot, and they spend about 12 hours a day doing it.
• Pandas are shy; they don't venture into areas where people live. This restricts pandas to very limited areas. As people continue to farm, log, and develop land higher and higher up the mountain slopes, the pandas' habitat continues to shrink.
• • Panda behavior and why they are endangered
• Conservation organizations and Chinese government officials and scientists continue to work toward resolving the pandas' isolation problems. Maintaining bamboo corridors—strips of undisturbed land through which pandas can comfortably travel from mountain to mountain—are one of the many ideas that may help save the giant panda.
• • How can they save pandas?
• Giant pandas may live to be up to 30 years old in captivity.
  
  After the age of six, female giant pandas begin to have cubs.
• • Pandas' lifespan
• Young pandas stay with their mothers for up to 18 months.
  
• • Habitat loss caused by logging is the largest threat to giant pandas today.
   
  • The Chinese name for panda is daxiongmao, which means "large bear-cat."
• Giant pandas are found in the wild only in mountainous bamboo forests of southwestern China.

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