Pandas so useless they just look at delicious kid who fell into enclosure Three years ago, internet memelords united under the clarion call "Dicks out for Harambe". The 17-year-old gorilla was shot and killed on 29 May 2016 after snatching a toddler at Cincinnati Zoo. Corbyn on a train Corbyn lied, Virgin Trains lied, Harambe died READ MORE Which was fair enough, seeing as the enormous ape could …
...in the breeding centre in Chengdu. Going rate for a selfie in it's cage was 100Y, which was about 8 quid at the time. I wasn't interested, largely because I got the impression they would have drugged it up first. As an animal, they are a bit useless: they have been even known to sit on their new born offspring.
and pigs have a survival strategy, they shoot out 10~15 piglets at a go; nobody misses the odd smooshed one. Also they, much like turtles, eat anything that gets within range or moves slower than they do. Many a goose on our farm lost their head trying to steal food from the pigs...
Perhaps the lesson the be learned by the panda is that being delicious is a better survival strategy for the species as a whole than being cute.
How true. I found Giant Panda tasted horrible. Grizzly bears and polar bears at least have a seafood diet. But, if you're looking for a vegan bear option, panda it is.
Did you sit through the video of a Panda giving birth. As the hamster sized new Panda popped out the mother looked confused for a few seconds and then went back to munching bamboo. Then one of the keepers rushed in to grab it before the mother sat on it.
Apparently in the wild the average mother has three goes before it realises they need to nurture these strange objects.
Judging by how Kodak, despite inventing the digital camera back in 1975, fell off a cliff by worrying about film business and not the digital one - they probably already have some of its DNA
That would be tricky, since giant pandas are (alone) in a different subfamily of ursidae and not closely genetically related to kodiaks or other ursinae. Quoth the 'pedia: "Nuclear chromosome analysis show that the karyotype of the six ursine bears is nearly identical, with each having 74 chromosomes, whereas the giant panda has 42 chromosomes".
That's not to say you couldn't snip genes from kodiak DNA and wodge them into the giant-panda genome somewhere, but we're not talking something straightforward like liger-breeding.
Frankly, it'd be cheaper to hire a good PR firm for black bears. Those bastards are successful.
A bit of trivia that I learned the other day.....The reason that the WWF chose the panda for its logo was because it's black and white, so letterheads, etc. would be much cheaper to print as they could use basic B&W printing rather than far more expensive full-colour.
Basically a toss-up between the panda and the zebra - I guess the panda got the gig because it looks cuter.
The older I get, the more I can relate to these creatures. Don't they kind of symbolise the human race as we collectively stare into the perfect storm of Brexit, Trump(it), climate and a myriad other outrages that we should be rioting about but instead of just shrugging and saying, 'Well, there's not much I can do about it, really, is there...'?
Maybe we should save the panda and instead let ourselves dwindle into extinction.
Maybe we should save the panda
Not much chance of that, when we're too stupid to be able to build an enclosure that prevents retards from dropping their kids in.
This had a happy outcome only because pandas are docile and vegetarian. Many, many other episodes that ended with the shooting of both escaped and unescaped zoo animals show that society values a single human peasant more highly than any endangered animal.
But there might be usefully inflammatory insight here. If the decision of some great-great-great grandbear to give up meat and start eating plants has led their descendants down an evolutionary cul de sac, should we not start treating vegans in the same way, as another prospectively endangered species on its way to extinction?
if we treat vegans like pandas we won't be allowed to shoot them anymore
Not en masse, I'd grant you. But think how much could be made selling a reasonable number of licensed gaming kills to the sort of disgusting rich trophy hunters who already like to buy the opportunity to hide a long way off before trying to kill an endangered animal with a sniper's rifle?
Trophy hunters get a bad press. I think rich people should be allowed to hunt endangered large carnivores as trophies. Unarmed. In hand to claw combat. If they can strangle the lion or hippo they get to put its head on the wall. Part of the deal is that before the hunt they change their will to leave all their property to appropriate charities.
They seem to have survived, like most species, without humans, for millions of years But when humans start taking over, wild animals die.
I was reading about ranching in the American West, and not merely the cattle and sheep were destined to be murdered by us, but at least 16 other species were massacred at random to ensure the increase in cattle and sheep for the profit of the rancher.
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Eventually some of the wild creatures remained, where they had once been only killed by other non-humans in a fairly balanced ecology, in order to provide targets for the hunting crowd.
Three Pandas recently survived a terrifying encounter with a human. A determined human climbed over a fence ready to savage a group of pandas but was fortunately unable to traverse a protective ditch. The pandas clearly had no idea of the danger they were in and approached the human to find out what was going on. Humans have eradicated dozens of species of animals and pandas are clearly on their hit-list. All animals are advised to keep away from humans and leave them to be dealt with by trained combat hippopotamuses.
In reality, hippos are scared of drying out so if their path to the water is blocked then they will trample everything in their way to get back there. A mature hippo weighs as much as a modern car so if the blockage is a human being then it will quickly resemble a car crash victim.
Never been chased by a white rhino but was scared as hell when a black rhino and calf decided that we were not to be tolerated anywhere near her and offspring (no quadbike).
Hippo, however are definitely to be avoided - actually saw one chase off a lioness attempting to make a meal of an unsuspecting waterbuck.
Ignorance is definitely a problem, though, as in my youth (about 40 years ago) my wife and I went walkabout at St Lucia (Natal, South Africa) and despite walking past MANY hippos survived unmolested, which my wife ascribed to them being vegetarians!
"The mere thought of a combat hippo is terrifying!"
Have you ever seen a hippo taking a dump?
Not only is it quite liquid, but their tail spins like a fan to make sure it spreads far and wide, hence leading to that well known saying shit hitting the fan. It's almost a weapon of mass destruction.
The panda IS a bear?!
One of these common pieces of trivia one always hear but never bothers to confirm, was that the panda is more closely related to raccoons than to bears... but it seems this useless sack of bamboo is firmly located within the Ursidae family.
Kodiaks and Grizzlies (and even Paddington!) are probably very ashamed of having such cousin
"One of these common pieces of trivia one always hear but never bothers to confirm, was that the panda is more closely related to raccoons than to bears... but it seems this useless sack of bamboo is firmly located within the Ursidae family."
The problem is that people confuse two very different animals that share the name "panda". Giant pandas are bears, and there's never really been any question about that. Red pandas, on the other hand, probably aren't. But only probably, because their actual classification has been moved around all over the place and even DNA analysis hasn't really nailed it down. They're probably more closely related to raccoons than bears, but in the past they were put in Ursidae along with giant pandas. At the moment they're generally put in their own family that's closer to raccoons and weasels than anything else, but is different enough to be its own separate thing with just them in it.
People just seem to get confused by all the shenanigans regarding whether it's a bear or a raccoon or something else, and miss the fact that whatever the red panda might be, it has absolutely nothing to do with giant pandas. Although it probably doesn't help that it's another idiot carnivore that insists on eating bamboo and desperately trying to go extinct.
So, the conclusions I draw from all of this are the following:
1. Pluto is a nut
2. The red panda is a planetessimal
3. The giant panda is a legume
4. The zebra is a horse in pyjamams
5. Hippos are incredibly angry that they can't have bacon, and are dammed if they'll miss out on lovely meat.
and have evolved 'cuteness' as a response, it seems to be working
Not as well as the panda chief strategist might have hoped. A quick search indicates that there's 300 pandas in captivity, and perhaps 1,800 in the wild. Tigers, on the other hand, there's an estimated 10,000 in captivity (mostly as "pets" in the US) and maybe 3,800 in the wild.
I'd say that whatever the tiger strategy is, that's working a whole lot better. I think I should do my bit, apply for a licence and get one and feed it on a diet of Jack Russells, chihuahuas, and other small yappy rodent-dogs.
Given that pandas will eat meat in the wild, on the rare occasion that they can get it, I wonder if the real problem is that we keep feeding them on the starvation diet they've become accustomed to rather than trying to teach them to enjoy a beef wellington. Get them used to the idea and they'll have the legs off that kid next time.
It has been found recently that giant pandas are still bears. They supplement their bamboo diet with eggs, nestlings and any other sort of meat bag animals they can catch when they need some haem iron.
I can guarantee the panda keepers knew this piece of modern biological knowledge which is why they were so concerned and urgently went to rescue her. Because the chances of injury were non zero and understood.
But then if El Reg understood this then this clickbait article would not be clickbait and nobody would get paid so ignorance is okay then. I despair.
Pandas are going down the same sort of evolutionary path as the Ice Age cave bears did; they are becoming grazers. The thing with pandas is that they made the change relatively recently in evolutionary terms; they are still mostly anatomically omnivores with a preference for meat. In captivity they will happily eat meat and do quite well on it too.
To be honest, if we want pandas to survive as a species, we're going to have to do a spot of genetic engineering. Give them either a hindgut fermentation system such as horses and elephants use, or a foregut fermentation system like cows. If we really want to push the boat out, the gut structure of a koala with both a foregut fermentation system AND hindgut fermentation but with different bacteria in each area is the only way to go, although the other adaptations of koalas, namely a very reduced brain, might be a bit far to go.
I see someone didn't hang about getting a video of the event, which probably was uploaded and viral within 10 minutes. Then the Panda haters and the Panda lovers would have both been up in arms across the Internet - and on TV news within the hour, with petitions for and against exterminating all Pandas. All the while, the EU voted to implement Panda privacy laws at the detrement of the Internet as a whole, and a new Panda tax to ensure this never happens again.
In the meantime, the Panda becomes an Internet sensation, on the cover of magazines, with Hollywood lining up to make a movies of the drama. The toddler is recast as a 21 year old starlet, and Johnny Depp is in line to play the Panda (with trade-mark eye makeup!). It's in line for an oscar nomination already by all accounts.
All I can add is - where were this toddlers parents, and why are they incompetent?
I don't think the article nor comments actually said they PREFERRED that the kid was mauled. But I'd just like to confirm in the case of any doubt that I'd only have been upset if pandas were hurt.
We've got 7.7 billion humans, many gormless enough to let their kids fall into a pit with wild animals. Losing one as panda food isn't going to give me sleepless nights. But we've only got about 2,000 pandas.
Next time you are near a panda why don't you jump in a pick a fight with one
I think you're missing the point. Most of us are smart enough not to jump into a pit with large and potentially dangerous animals, nor let our kids get in.
Giant pandas clearly are following poor lifestyle choices in an awful environment, and doing poorly as expected. But WHY did they get this way? If a group of once-successful bears moves into a marginal area and starts living on nutrition-poor food, they will not develop into a new species. They will die out instead due to poorly adaptive behaviors. For giant pandas to get where they are, their current lifestyle had to be POSITIVELY adaptive at some point in their past. They had to be more successful than "regular" bears, as weird as that first sounds.
When does it pay to live somewhere marginal? When the better living conditions are full of monsters or endemic disease. Somewhere in the past, something nasty arrived to decimate panda populations. The survivors were driven up into the mountains, where there's not much high-quality food to eat. Meanwhile down below, the rest of the population was wiped out or driven away. Eking out a bare living beats dying any day. I suggest the giant panda is a survivor of such an event.
Every giant panda alive is descended from the ones most compelled to live high and eat bamboo, so that lifestyle is very strongly wired into them. The problem is that now the giant panda could be making a better living farther down with a broader diet. The monsters are gone or the epidemic has faded into the background, but the panda keeps living on the fringe. In the new context, their once-successful behavior has become extremely maladaptive.
This happens in the natural world all the time, and it might require some pretty weird changes to survive. When the crisis has passed, the survivors MAY eventually try different behavior and become better adapted to the changed environment. Some do not and fade away into extinction. Barring a radical change in behavior, the giant panda - in the current conditions - is indeed a failure and would probably die out eventually without human interference or assistance.
They're miserable losers now, but in the past this lifestyle was their only chance to keep the species alive...
"When the better living conditions are full of monsters or endemic disease. Somewhere in the past, something nasty arrived to decimate panda populations."
It's possible that the 'monsters' are us. Homo sapiens. A study (summarized in a recent issue of The Economist) hypothesizes that it was the spread of humans that drove pandas into marginal ecosystems. Where the only thing left to eat was bamboo.
Ancient people and their possible taste for panda meat no longer being an issue, it now appears that pandas might be able to co-exist with us, given their mellow dispositions (as demonstrated by this incident). Many animals that we neither compete with nor consume can adapt to human presence if they become acclimated to us.
Ancient people and their possible taste for panda meat no longer being an issue, it now appears that pandas might be able to co-exist with us, given their mellow dispositions (as demonstrated by this incident). Many animals that we neither compete with nor consume can adapt to human presence if they become acclimated to us.
Let them work as phone support techs for a while. That will cure their mellow dispositions.
Attention downvoters! Any time the zoologic geneticists use the term "Living Fossil" it means they haven't the faintest idea where to stick the animal in question in the big branchy diagram of life.
And they use that term for both Giant Pandas *and* Red Pandaraccoons.
It is the genetic equivalent of throwing up one's hands and just hard-coding "true".
With respect to the Giant Panda, the classification of "bear" is actually one of "common ancestor with bears if we look back to the days of sloths the size of schoolbuses" and horses the size of greyhounds.
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Harambe was due to die for organ harvesting anyway, as its tissue had tested as being compatible with that of another Panda who was a senior member of the local communist party.
The child was the offspring of two Falun Gong members who had already been harvested. Zoo management had hoped that a tastey red meat snack might arouse Harambe's libido, in the same way that powdered rhino horn affects humans, but the experiment was sabotaged by the premature action of the slaughterman employed to kill him.
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