Giant Pandas: Strength in Brawn not Numbers

Authors’ note: I wrote this to show what pandas are like because not many people know what they are like.

The giant panda is a marvelous creature and they shouldn’t be taken for granted. There are only thousands left in the world. It is an endangered species and soon it might be extinct. We should keep the panda going because it is a wonderful creature. Not many people know about the panda and its qualities.

Giant pandas don’t always live up to their name. When babies the panda is considerably small. “A newborn cub weighs three to five ounces and is about the size of a stick of butter. Pink, hairless, and blind, the cub is 1/900th the size of its mother”(park). Its size is trivial compared to its mothers size and that makes it hard for the mother to take care of her cub. “Cubs do not open their eyes until they are six to eight weeks of age and are not mobile until three months” (park). They can’t even do anything until then so the mother has to do all the work for the baby until then.

After the baby has grown it will get its food from bamboo. Bamboo is what its diet mainly consists of. The panda will have to eat lots of bamboo because the panda has an inefficient digestion system and most of the food is passed as waste so it will eat lots of bamboo to make up for it (park). It also gets its water from bamboo because bamboo has water inside of it. Since that water is not enough it will also drink water from the stream.

Food that they eat keeps them alive but not as long as we live. Pandas lives are less than 40 years. It is not known how long a panda lives in the wild but scientists are sure it is less than what a panda lives in the zoo which is 35 years old reported by Chinese scientists (park). Their life-spans might be short but it is not the reason that they are endangered. People had hunted them and made them lose their habitat. We only acted to save them after they became endangered. The reason that they cannot populate fast is because a female panda usually only successfully raises 5-8 cubs in her lifetime (park).

Pandas are simple but fascinating. They have many qualities that people don’t know because they don’t care. They should care however because pandas have the right to live just like us. We should help their species live on and not become extinct.