12 Giant Panda Facts Now That We’ve Got Two More of Those Suckers

Despite it being almost the entirety of their diet, bamboo is a terrible source of nutrition. Despite not weighing much more than a large human, pandas have to eat 28 pounds of it a day.

Their bamboo diet has inconvenient wrinkles beyond pure volume, too. They need to consume at least two different species of bamboo in order to survive.

All this bamboo-eating, despite the fact that they’re clearly engineered to be a carnivore. Their teeth and especially digestive system are those of a meat-eater, which makes the whole thing more complicated.

While their stomach is way behind, their hands have evolved to meet their new foodstuff. They have a sort of opposable thumb that allows them to grip bamboo shoots more easily.

The artifacts of their meat-eating are remnants from their past, which is incredibly long. Fossils of direct ancestors have been found from over two million years ago.

If roars used to be part of their role as predatory meat-eaters, they’ve long lost that trick. If they communicate, it’s through barks and huffs, closer to a dog than a bear.

Another bear classic that the giant panda eschews? Hibernation. They don’t hibernate whatsoever, instead traveling up and down their natural mountain habitats in search of comfortable temperatures.

If you need a reason to feel okay about them being stuck in a zoo, you can at least tell yourself that doing so almost doubles their lifespan. Wild pandas live from 15 to 20 years, but pandas in captivity usually live for 25 to 35 years.

Not just in comparison to bears, either. When a baby giant panda is born, it weighs only about 3.5 ounces. That's about the weight of a stick of butter.

Pandas are solitary creatures, and a cub will leave its parents to live alone at about 18 months of age.

If you see a giant panda anywhere outside of China, it’s because it's been officially leased from the Chinese government.

Not only that, if any other country manages to produce a cub from their giant pandas, it immediately is considered a citizen of China, and has to be sent back at three months old.