I was a little surprised to read this Treehugger item about a panda caught on camera eating meat. Up until this morning, so far as I knew, pandas famously eat only bamboo. 

 

It's one of the worst stories of evolutionary adaptations, too, because the bamboo doesn't grow where the pandas live. Instead, they have to hike up and down the mountains every day just to get their daily ration of bamboo. And they subsist on only two species of bamboo, despite the proliferation of thousands of bamboo species in China.

To make things worse, bamboo is not very nutrient-dense. If you are big animal - like a bear - you have to eat a staggering amount of bamboo just to support your body's bulk. Particularly when you have to travel a long, difficult distance just to get to your feeding grounds, thus burning a lot of calories. 

 

The panda's feeding regimen is time consuming and inefficient, and it leaves them with very little buffer against disaster. When your entire existence is literally dependent on one single plant, things can get dicey very fast, which is one big reason why pandas are such a threatened species.

 

But if pandas can eat meat, it raises the question, how much meat are they eating? Is it possible that previous reports of pandas being almost exclusively bamboo eaters are incorrect? We know so little about wild pandas, I can't help but wonder if the conventional wisdom that pandas only eat "sometimes a little meat" is false.

 

Pandas, after all, evolved from omnivores. It is an Ursid, sharing a common relative with the world's other bears. Pandas were once classified as relatives of the raccoon, but DNA evidence shows that it differentiated early from the other ursines, and its closest living relative is the South American spectacled bear. Red pandas, however, are still considered relatives of the raccoon, and are only very distantly related to the familiar black and white panda.

 

The panda's physiology is still set up to digest meat, and of course it retains the sharp teeth and claws found in other bears. The fact that the panda is able to digest bamboo is due entirely to the microbes in its gut, which essentially digest all the bamboo's cellulose for it. 

 

I can't help but wonder if our beliefs about the panda's diet is influenced by our cultural feelings about the panda. Roly poly, fuzzy, and adorably toy-like; who would want to think of pandas attacking other animals, or digging into abandoned carcasses on a regular basis?