Almost everyone loves pandas. Nowadays, every way you turn, you can see someone wearing a panda shirt. Their cuteness is based on their majestic appearance, and their lay back lifestyle as they pretty much rest and eat, day after day.
If you are a panda lover, then you will find these ten panda facts quite fascinating.
1. Pandas eat meat too
Everyone knows that pandas eat bamboo. But pandas are also very fond of certain fruits too even though that’s not a common sight. However, rarely who knows that pandas are okay with eating meat as well. At least when there is no bamboo or some fruit to eat.
On a positive note, they are too lazy and too slow to chase and catch anything. That makes them pretty lousy predators.
2. They eat a lot
Their days consist of eating and sleeping. Their laziness is notorious and well documented. What’s fascinating is that they can spend as long as 14 hours of eating. That’s 14 hours of chewing on bamboo shoots. An adult panda can eat up to 38 kilos of bamboo a day, all year long. On average, adult pandas weight 15 kilos, but they can weigh as much as 150 kilos in captivity.
3. Panda babies are born in August.
The pandas mate from March to May. The gestation period is from three to five months, which means that baby pandas will be born at some point in august. Females, by default, give birth to two offsprings. But in the wild, only one of the baby pandas get to live.
On the other hand, when in captivity, one of the offsprings is hand-reared most of the time. From time to time, the panda keepers swap the offsprings so the mama panda can raise the two cubs.
4. Pandas have been around for quite some time.
It is almost unreal to find out that there were pandas between one and two million years ago as lazy as they are. At one point, there were pandas basically in every part of today’s China. Nowadays, there are pandas only living freely in Tibetan foothills. So for two million years, they’ve managed to survive despite their overwhelming laziness.
5. Pandas have six toes.
Thanks to their extra tumb, they can easily maneuver bamboo for efficient eating.
6. Pandas love licking iron and copper.
When you serve a meal in a metal bowl, they first eat the food and lick the bowl. They can’t help it and lick the bowl every time. It is the same for pandas living both in freedom and captivity. In the past, free-roaming pandas had a reputation as notorious lickers and eaters of cooking pots that belonged to Chinese peasants.
7. Pandas poop a lot
An adult panda can poop as much as 28 kilos per day. Yearly, that comes down to more than 10 tons of poop. In the wild, researchers use their poop to track them. In the past, panda hunters tracked pandas using that same method, and it is one of the reasons why pandas were endangered.
