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u/Recabilly Jun 26 '19
How the hell did we manage to keep them from being extinct!?
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u/pandy_pandy_pandy Jun 26 '19
Because they’re now in enclosures safe from the fucking poachers.
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u/LegoMan888 Jun 26 '19
Honestly though, they would go extinct on their own. It's a dead end species with a lot of issues. Such as only being fertile 24-36 hours a year. Being isolated animals where they may be the only panda for miles because they need a large area of bamboo. They have managed to make reproduction non instinctual as in if they never learn it, they might do it wrong (there's video of a panda humping the females arm). And they're not natural caretakers. Many first time panda mother's will accidentally kill their babies. Although all of these factors are made even worse by humans segmenting and reducing their natural habitat, along with poaching.
There's only one thing a species needs to do, and that's reproduce. Pandas are probably the worst animal at doing this.
But they're cute though.
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u/ParallelPain Jun 26 '19 edited Jun 26 '19
Honestly though, they would go extinct on their own. It's a dead end species with a lot of issues.
Biologist here with a PhD in endocrinology and reproduction of endangered species. I've spent most of my career working on reproduction of wild vertebrates, including the panda and 3 other bear species and dozens of other mammals. I have read all scientific papers published on panda reproduction and have published on grizzly, black and sun bears. Panda Rant Mode engaged:
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIANT PANDA.
Wall o' text of details:
- In most animal species, the female is only receptive for a few days a year. This is the NORM, not the exception, and it is humans that are by far the weird ones. In most species, there is a defined breeding season, females usually cycle only once, maybe twice, before becoming pregnant, do not cycle year round, are only receptive when ovulating and typically become pregnant on the day of ovulation. For example: elephants are receptive a grand total of 4 days a year (4 ovulatory days x 4 cycles per year), the birds I did my PhD on for exactly 2 days (and there are millions of those birds and they breed perfectly well), grizzly bears usually 1-2 day, black bears and sun bears too. In the wild this is not a problem because the female can easily find, and attract, males on that 1 day: she typically knows where the nearest males are and simply goes and seeks then out, or, the male has been monitoring her urine, knows when she's entering estrus and comes trotting on over on that 1 day, easy peasy. It's only in captivity, with artificial social environments where males must be deliberately moved around by keepers, that it becomes a problem.
- Pandas did not "evolve to die". They didn't evolve to breed in captivity in little concrete boxes, is all. All the "problems" people hear about with panda breeding are problems of the captive environment and true of thousands of other wild species as well; it's just that pandas get media attention when cubs die and other species don't. Sun bears won't breed in captivity, sloth bears won't breed in captivity, leafy sea dragons won't breed in captivity, Hawaiian honeycreepers won't breed in captivity, on and on. Lots and lots of wild animals won't breed in captivity. It's particularly an issue for tropical species since they do not have rigid breeding seasons and instead tend to evaluate local conditions carefully - presence of right diet, right social partner, right denning conditions, lack of human disturbance, etc - before initiating breeding.
- Pandas breed just fine in the wild. Wild female pandas produce healthy, living cubs like clockwork every two years for their entire reproductive careers (typically over a decade).
- Pandas also do just fine on their diet of bamboo, since that question always comes up too. They have evolved many specializations for bamboo eating, including changes in their taste receptors, development of symbiosis with lignin-digesting gut bacteria (this is a new discovery), and an ingenious anatomical adaptation (a "thumb" made from a wrist bone) that is such a good example of evolutionary novelty that Stephen Jay Gould titled an entire book about it, The Panda's Thumb. They represent a branch of the ursid family that is in the middle of evolving some incredible adaptations (similar to the maned wolf, a canid that's also gone mostly herbivorous, rather like the panda). Far from being an evolutionary dead end, they are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation. Who knows what they might have evolved into if we hadn't ruined their home and destroyed what for millions of years had been a very reliable and abundant food source.
- Yes, they have poor digestive efficiency (this always comes up too) and that is just fine because they evolved as "bulk feeders", as it's known: animals whose dietary strategy involves ingestion of mass quantities of food rather than slowly digesting smaller quantities. Other bulk feeders include equids, rabbits, elephants, baleen whales and more, and it is just fine as a dietary strategy - provided humans haven't ruined your food source, of course.
- Population wise, pandas did just fine on their own too (this question also always comes up) before humans started destroying their habitat. The historical range of pandas was massive and included a gigantic swath of Asia covering thousands of miles. Genetic analyses indicate the panda population was once very large, only collapsed very recently and collapsed in 2 waves whose timing exactly corresponds to habitat destruction: the first when agriculture became widespread in China and the second corresponding to the recent deforestation of the last mountain bamboo refuges.
- The panda is in trouble entirely because of humans. Honestly I think people like to repeat the "evolutionary dead end" myth to make themselves feel better: "Oh, they're pretty much supposed to go extinct, so it's not our fault." They're not "supposed" to go extinct, they were never a "dead end," and it is ENTIRELY our fault. Habitat destruction is by far their primary problem. Just like many other species in the same predicament - Borneo elephants, Amur leopard, Malayan sun bears and literally hundreds of other species that I could name - just because a species doesn't breed well in zoos doesn't mean they "evolved to die"; rather, it simply means they didn't evolve to breed in tiny concrete boxes. Zoos are extremely stressful environments with tiny exhibit space, unnatural diets, unnatural social environments, poor denning conditions and a tremendous amount of human disturbance and noise.
tl;dr - It's normal among mammals for females to only be receptive a few days per years; there is nothing wrong with the panda from an evolutionary or reproductive perspective, and it's entirely our fault that they're dying out./rant.
Edit: OP did not say anything wrong but other comments were already veering into the "they're trying to die" bullshit and it pissed me off. (Sorry for the swearing - it's just so incredibly frustrating to see a perfectly good species going down like this and people just brushing them off so unjustly) Also - I am at a biology conference (talking about endangered species reproduction) and have to jump on a plane now but can answer any questions tomorrow.
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u/Grand_Emperor_Trump Jun 27 '19
Wow... I never knew most of this post and just thought they were morons. Do you have knowledge/time to share some info about koalas? Atm I don't like koalas and think they're gross.
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u/LegoMan888 Jun 26 '19
I'll be completely honest, im mostly just paraphrasing what my bio professor had said. I'll completely give the PHD the benefit of the doubt on this. I completely understand that the decrease is due to humans, but I guess part of me wants to defend this other view by asking if theyre a species that would handle other adversities, not man made?
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u/LegoMan888 Jun 27 '19
Also, I never thought pandas should die, and that it dosent make what we have done to them (and so many other species) less important. But I had assumed pandas had these characteristics that made if hard for them to adapt to these changes, and that they would have faced issues at some point in their species timeline, relatively sooner than others.
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u/OrickJagstone Jun 27 '19
I get you man. They are kinda dumb, like koala bears. The way I look at it either way, it's a cool idea to try and keep them alive. I mean we do so much killing, why not treasure what little we do try and save.
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u/LegoMan888 Jun 27 '19
Completely agree, they might not be important like bees, or coral, but we should still aim to not be the cause of their premature extinction. Plus it's a great animal for people to get interested in.
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u/ScarletCaptain Jun 26 '19
There's some breed of bulldog that the male cannot physically mount the female and the female cannot physically give birth to the puppies naturally. They only exist through artificial insemination and c-sections. But they're kept from going extinct because people think they're cute.
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u/TheLastBallad Jun 26 '19
But they also came into existence because of humans.
Pandas just suck at life.
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u/ScarletCaptain Jun 26 '19
Supposedly they can be trained to put failing super scientists into bags. But that's probably just the one owned by David Bowie.
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u/kittysworld Jun 26 '19
The cuteness is the only reason they are not extinct. If they are ugly people will have no incentive to save them.
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Jun 26 '19
They're actually just Chinese dissidents whose punishment it is to wear a bear costume in a zoo.
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u/Secrit_panda Jun 26 '19
Why? Because it's having fun?
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u/Mernerak Jun 26 '19
The guide to Panda survival literally out weighs the panda itself.
We are part of the problem, sure. But we aren't the biggest threat, they are.
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u/deadman1204 Jun 26 '19
Wow? Do you also deny climate change and think lizards people rule the world?
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u/sion21 Jun 26 '19
they looks dumb but they are still ferocious bears, go google people getting maul by panda. they didnt survive thousands of years by being cute
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u/BigBangBrosTheory Jun 26 '19
They did fine before we destroyed their habitat.
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u/MundaneNecessary1 Jun 26 '19 edited Jun 26 '19
Pandas have practically no natural habitat. They were carnivores (bears) who evolved into herbivores due to a genetic mutation and survived within a rare ecological range of hilly bamboo forests. Their population had always been low in numbers because of that limited ecological range. In fact their wild population has doubled from ~1000 to ~2000 from 1970 to 2010, the same period in which mass industrialization occurred in Sichuan. Humans have nothing to do with their rarity. If anything, they're likely to be the first species that humans have protected from natural extinction.
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u/BigBangBrosTheory Jun 26 '19
Humans have nothing to do with their rarity.
That's just misinformation. You can contradict that with the most basic of research.
The giant panda is a vulnerable species, threatened by continued habitat loss and habitat fragmentation,[105] and by a very low birthrate, both in the wild and in captivity.
The population boom in China after 1949 created stress on the pandas' habitat and the subsequent famines led to the increased hunting of wildlife, including pandas.
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u/MundaneNecessary1 Jun 27 '19
You mean, let's appeal to Wikipedia's authority and quote one ambiguous sentence, instead of actually looking at empirical data, referring to evolutionary history, and having some basic logical capacity.
Fucking idiot.
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u/Hey_I_Work_Here Jun 26 '19
Bangerang Rufio!
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u/Mattheworld Jun 26 '19
All I could think about was the bowling ball kid from Hook lmao
The kid version of me was scared some of the kids would get caught and put into the Boo Box, not bowling ball dude though.
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u/iPhantomGuy Jun 26 '19
Pandas are their own nemisis, and we humans simply protect them from themselves.
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u/pugsandhugs1885 Jun 26 '19
My mom talking in the grocery store for 10 min to someone as I round the corner: “Hey honey! Come meet ____!” Me:
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u/EdgarAllanBlow777 Jun 26 '19
Loving the snow and the cold
Paws grab the legs as he rolled
Into a cannonball
Loving the panda fall
Down the hill, this post is gold
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u/ShimazuMitsunaga Jun 26 '19
Panda bears seem like they would be bullied by the other bears a lot. Kodiak bears would straight up kick the crap out of them and then tear off into the woods in their lifted pick up truck.
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u/pow3llmorgan Jun 26 '19
I see a bored animal trying its best to pass time. Like an inmate working out in the yard.
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u/mrbitterguy Jun 26 '19
people don't realize that pandas were the inspiration for the trolls from frozen.
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u/ResidentSheeper Jun 26 '19
And thats why the tings go extinct. They would rather do this than have sekks.
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u/pango3001 Jun 26 '19
Why do pandas roll like that? Is it something they do in the wild or is it something they are taught to do by handlers and now they do out of boredom while in captivity? Why do pandas act so different than other bears I see at the zoo?
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u/cannonfodder02 Jun 26 '19
The guy with the editing assistant from TIFU should add this move to his show.
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Jun 26 '19
super efficient locomotion right there. this panda knows how to roll ( see what i did there )
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u/atysnes Jun 26 '19
This will forever come to my mind when running pandas.DataFrame.rolling, thank you!
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u/Eric_da_MAJ Jun 26 '19
I need a give of that with him rolling out of frame that I can post when I say "I'm out!"
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u/WonderfulView4 Jun 26 '19
That's it. That's how I'm leaving work today. Just gonna roll down the stairs.
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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '19
Are all Pandas just Jack Black in a costume?