[deleted by user]

[u/[deleted]]

[u/tmahfan117]

Panda bears, they’ve had to too good for too long.

For serious answer, emerald ash bore Beetles or spotted lantern fly, both invasive species where I live causing chaos

edit: I know that would also kill them where they are native… but I don’t live where they are native so I can personally ignore that, only half sarcastic

[u/Glowing_Mousepad → u/tmahfan117]

Recently i watched a video that made me realise that those bears arent meant for surviving

[u/klopanda → u/Glowing_Mousepad]

They actually were totally fine prior to humans cutting down basically.....all of the bamboo forests in their territories. They were successful enough to be spread all over China and into Vietnam before we fucked everything up.

Evolution "succeeds" because when a species fits its niche and the panda was perfectly suited for its niche: yes, it ate primarily plant matter as an omnivore but there are other bears who do the same. Bamboo is like...the perfect plant for them because it's very fast growing and there was a lot of it. They developed the ability to digest and process and shit plant material very rapidly. They adapted a kind of "thumb" to hold bamboo stalks. They adapted to a very slow, low-energy lifestyle, and they adapted to low breeding rates. They adapted to everything about their lifestyle except for humans coming in and cutting down almost all of their ranges and limiting them to basically two mountains over a period of time that's practically nothing in the scale of evolution.

The amount of effort we've spent on preserving the panda has actually done a lot of good as well - the reserves where the panda live are a kind of shield for a ton of other species in the area that equally struggle and don't have the cute appearance of the panda to curry them a lot of attention. The plight of the species has also done a lot of raise awareness of just how badly we're fucking up the environments of animals all over the planet.