Pandas at Risk in Bamboo Crisis

[chlamor]

Pandas at risk in bamboo crisis

Patrick Barkham
Tuesday March 29, 2005
The Guardian

Hundreds of giant pandas in western China could die from starvation because the bamboo plants they eat have begun to flower and die back, it was revealed yesterday.
Wardens at the Baishuijiang State nature reserve in the north western province of Gansu are to monitor the 102 pandas in the reserve for signs of hunger after the arrow bamboo in the region began a potentially devastating cyclical dying-back phase. This occurs about once every 60 years.

With bamboo die-back observed to some degree in all the regions where the endangered animals still live, conservationists gave warning that China's entire wild population could be at risk and appealed to local people not to drive off starving pandas if they entered villages looking for food.

Compelled to eat half their own body weight in bamboo each day to survive, pandas derive most of their nutrition from the shoots. But they refuse to eat it when bamboo forms flowers. The bamboo blooms then produces seeds before dying off, and it takes 10 years for a new crop to mature.

<snip>

A mass die-back of bamboo in the 1970s caused the deaths of about 250 pandas, Xinhua said. However, studies carried out after the mass dying of bamboo found pandas survived if there was more than one species of bamboo in a locality.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,13369,1447200,00.html

[seriousstan]

1. Discover magazine did an article about how the odds are against this panda.

Giant pandas are found only in the mountains of central China — in small isolated areas of the north and central portions of the Sichuan Province, in the mountains bordering the southernmost part of Gansu Province and in the Qinling Mountains of the Shaanxi Province.

Giant pandas can eat 25 different types of bamboo, but they usually eat only the 4 or 5 kinds that grow in their home range.

Giant pandas are not ruminates but are carnivores that only eat bamboo. They do not have the bacteria and enzymes in their guts needed to extract the most out of bamboo.

Because bamboo is so low in nutrients, pandas eat as much as 84 pounds (38 kilograms) of it each day.

The giant panda reaches breeding maturity between four and ten years of age.

Pandas like to be by themselves most of the year, and they have a very short breeding season when a male will look for a female to mate with. Females give birth to one or two cubs, which are very dependent on their mothers during the first few years of life. In the wild, mother pandas will care for only one of the young.

Pandas are notoriously picky breeders.

There is very little room for recovering from and natural disaster.

[chlamor]

2. I'm thinking about a world without the tiger-without the panda

and so many other creatures that I needn't ever see. Seems a grey industrial wasteland and we would be dispirited in our subconscious I think.

[AlCzervik]

3. my daughter and i were just talking about this the other day

on her way home from school, i was explaining to her what the problem was and she was so confused....confused about how humans just don't get it sometimes.

[chlamor]

4. How to talk about this with children?

We have two very young boys and how you approach the topic seems difficult and sad. To think of the mass extinctions underway. And also the scarcity of wildlife that is still with us. I wish I were more optimistic about this techno-future were hurtling towards.

[AlCzervik]

5. Well my daughter or whale hugger as we call her is 10

and couple of years ago we bought an excellent dvd series from the BBC and we started watching them with her and they are all about our planet and that helped to open up a dialogue with her in regards to whats going on without scaring her witless. Go check out this page and you can buy the series if you like or i bet you can borrow them from your library. I think it's excellent that you want to talk about this with your kids.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/blueplanet/

[chlamor]

6. Thank You

We will look for this in our library. I remember a question once posed by John Seed in discussing our loss of non-humans and the "diminishment". Do we sufficiently feel the loss? I'm afraid we don't as we don't truly live in the world. I am behind a computer at this point and is it real?