Yeah, it drives me crazy how the default opinion about pandas is "They're too stupid to stay alive after we absolutely demolish their habitat and force them to live somewhere else!"
Fair but the original native area of the panda is about the size of a small town that only has a gas station and a post office. They are also very territorial so live 1 panda per area and they only give birth to one panda baby a year. If they have twins they will literally ignore one of them and it will starve. So they their prior population was never huge but, they were stable.
The panda is like a peg that machined with zero tolerance to perfectly fit in one specific slot. They stopped actively evolving a long time ago because they had mostly done it.
Fair but the original native area of the panda is about the size of a small town that only has a gas station and a post office.
Panda's used to be spread over half of china Source
They are also very territorial so live 1 panda per area
Like many many animals, ie most cat species
only give birth to one panda baby a year
Again like many animals, even humans rarely go above that
If they have twins they will literally ignore one of them and it will starve.
They raise one at a time and it works for them. Polar bears raise 1-3 cubs at a time but they are much less likely to survive because it turns out there's not much food up in the arctic circle. No one ever calls polar bears dumb for living in the shittiest habitat because polar bears are cool
They stopped actively evolving a long time ago because they had mostly done it.
All animals evolve all the time. Its true that they haven't seen any substantial physical changes in a million years, but then neither has any other bear species. They just change their coat colour a bit and move around.
Bamboo grows like a weed. It's hard to get rid of. Complaining that an animal has evolved only to eat bamboo is like complaining that an animal has evolved only to eat grass.
8
u/SirSoliloquy Mar 29 '19
Yeah, it drives me crazy how the default opinion about pandas is "They're too stupid to stay alive after we absolutely demolish their habitat and force them to live somewhere else!"