Anyone else find the panda keeper's comments strange?

I did. A little too...

Early this morning Lun Lun ate a few biscuits and slices of fruit. Then she went back to sleep. She was restless for a few hours yesterday evening.
T.M.I.
Who the fark cares?

Panda Watch. The mood is tense; I have been on some serious, serious reports but nothing quite like this.

Why do people always give Pandas stupid ass names?

All went according to plan. There were no complications; the threat has been neutralized and your package has been secured, Mr. Bowie.

Track Lun Lun's Hormones? Are they serious?

BillaBong:
Why do people always give Pandas stupid ass names?

What, like the Chinese names pretty much every panda in captivity has?

Gee, I wonder why they would give pandas Chinese names.

Dipsh*t.

Zulu_as_Kono

What, like the Chinese names pretty much every panda in captivity has?
Gee, I wonder why they would give pandas Chinese names.
Dipsh*t.

How about you stop making excuses for yourself. China needs to name all of its pandas Bob, Roger, and Suzy from now on. Cuz "Lun Lun" just sounds stupid.

God Bless America.

Jeff_from_MD:
How about you stop making excuses for yourself.

Wha?!?

i was waiting for the Baby Suri reference.

/as soon as i saw the word "alien" i knew it was coming.
//thanks, Clold for making my dreams come true.

awwwwwwwww

That is one fat-ass panda biatch.

Clold. Awesome. Seriously.

Quick, let's tie it up and throw it in the oven!

QueenOfTheUniverse
Track Lun Lun's Hormones? Are they serious?

Yep. You didn't see the three-year chart?

Apparently, panda breeding is at least part guessing game, due to the very small size of the baby, and lots of false alarms. From the log, it looks like the baby never showed up on ultrasound. So it's "Test the pee, then wait and see" until a baby arrives or not.

Where's Brent Sienna when you need him?

Lets's track Lun Lun hormones!!

"I'm drunk on pandamystery"

Sifl and Olly, Sifl and Olly show

Most chinese girls I know take english names when they come here. I'm glad this one stuck to her guns.

For those who don't know, when the 10 year - $10 million lease on this bear ends, the baby and mother must be returned to China. All Pandas are owned by China and leased to zoo's world wide.

Oddity of evolution...that's for sure.

Guess we're doin' the right thing.

Kinda like women: can't live with 'em - can't live without 'em?

Why can't we just let the pandas go extinct quietly? If they are too lazy to mate, then we should let Darwin take over.

BuzzBoy: For those who don't know, when the 10 year - $10 million lease on this bear ends, the baby and mother must be returned to China. All Pandas are owned by China and leased to zoo's world wide.

And that is ridiculous.

baorao: Why can't we just let the pandas go extinct quietly? If they are too lazy to mate, then we should let Darwin take over.

Because Panda steak is damn tasty.

baorao
Why can't we just let the pandas go extinct quietly? If they are too lazy to mate, then we should let Darwin take over.

Giant Pandas aren't "too lazy to mate." They're just very very hard to breed in captivity. Their reproduction rate in the wild had been fine for a million years until the Chinese fragmented their habitat and cut down a large percentage of their food sources.

They breed slowly in the wild because they're pretty much the highest animal on the food chain in their ecosystem and would quickly overwhelm the bamboo sources if they were too populous. Especially in years where the bamboo sources flower and die off.

Giant Pandas eat so much bamboo in a single day that they are solitary in the wild by necessity. A single Giant Panda needs a range of up 1-4 sq miles of bamboo to feed upon. This may seem like a lot, but given that they spend 10-12 hours a day feeding in the wild, this area isn't as big as it sounds. And many ranges do overlap. This is how they find mates.

The species has existed for over a million years at their "lazy" rate of reproduction. It wasn't until humans destroyed their habitat that their rate of reproduction became a problem.

baorao: "And that is ridiculous".

It's a FACT !!!

Just because you are not aware of it doesn't mean it's ridiculous. To verify it, call a few zoos. I live in Atlanta and know it to be a fact.

baorao:

GOOGLE: "panda lease"

Enlighten yourself !

Zulu_as_Kono
What, like the Chinese names pretty much every panda in captivity has?

Gee, I wonder why they would give pandas Chinese names.

Dipsh*t.


I was partially joking. Sorry if I offended you.

BuzzBoy: It's a FACT !!!

Doesn't mean it's not stupid.

BuzzBoy

What does this have to do with Fiat?

Crosscheck42

The species has existed for over a million years at their "lazy" rate of reproduction. It wasn't until humans destroyed their habitat that their rate of reproduction became a problem.

That's evolution for ya. I'm not saying we should just let them go extinct, though.

BuzzBoy: It's a FACT !!!

Just because you are not aware of it doesn't mean it's ridiculous. To verify it, call a few zoos. I live in Atlanta and know it to be a fact.

I wasn't questioning your statement. I was merely stating that the idea that one country can own an animal and lease it out to other countries is stupid.

Crosscheck42: Giant Pandas aren't "too lazy to mate." They're just very very hard to breed in captivity. Their reproduction rate in the wild had been fine for a million years until the Chinese fragmented their habitat and cut down a large percentage of their food sources.

They breed slowly in the wild because they're pretty much the highest animal on the food chain in their ecosystem and would quickly overwhelm the bamboo sources if they were too populous. Especially in years where the bamboo sources flower and die off.

Giant Pandas eat so much bamboo in a single day that they are solitary in the wild by necessity. A single Giant Panda needs a range of up 1-4 sq miles of bamboo to feed upon. This may seem like a lot, but given that they spend 10-12 hours a day feeding in the wild, this area isn't as big as it sounds. And many ranges do overlap. This is how they find mates.

The species has existed for over a million years at their "lazy" rate of reproduction. It wasn't until humans destroyed their habitat that their rate of reproduction became a problem.

So then maybe they are too stupid to figure out a more abundant food source? Sure bamboo probably tastes the best, but shouldn't they be naturally adjusting their diet to include many types of food?

/face it, pandas suck. they are like the Danica Patrick of the animal kindgom.

baorao
So then maybe they are too stupid to figure out a more abundant food source? Sure bamboo probably tastes the best, but shouldn't they be naturally adjusting their diet to include many types of food?

So maybe they don't need to? You missed your original point. Darwin likes pandas just fine. Humans don't, especially the ones who confused mother nature for driving their own beauties to extinction.

Pandas are the farkin top of the food chain in China. THey can eat berries, wild meat, human treats, anything in fact. But it's not like there's a bunch of zebras running around for them to catch in the bamboo forests, so they just eat what's there.

Just because they don't breed like cockroaches doesn't mean you need to keep telling yourself they can't survive for another several thousand years. If you don't like pandas, get a rabbit. Cuz they ain't going nowhere.

pestossimo
That's evolution for ya.

No.

It isn't.

Species evolve over hundreds if not thousands of generations. The Giant Panda's habitat has been destroyed systematically over the last 100 years. In a graphic timeline of the species' development, that would be such a small fraction of time as to be completely invisible.

Further, Giant Pandas can live to be 30 years or older. 200 years is hardly enough time for the species to have evolved an entirely new method of reproduction.

baorao
So then maybe they are too stupid to figure out a more abundant food source? Sure bamboo probably tastes the best, but shouldn't they be naturally adjusting their diet to include many types of food?

The Giant Panda didn't start eating bamboo because it was "tasty." They evolved the behavior because it was a potential food source of which virtually no other animal in their ecosystem, save insects and bamboo rats, were taking advantage. The Giant Panda EVOLVED over hundreds of thousands of years to make use of a resource that was in abundance.

That resource has been all-but eliminated within the last 100 years. As I said above, that's not enough time for them to evolve their reproductive and eating habits.

Further, you seem to assume that there's a multitude of alternative food sources available to Giant Pandas in their ecosystem. There's not. That's why the Chinese peasants keep cutting down the forests so they can grow food.

Giant Pandas aren't hunters.

Giant Pandas do occasionally eat small mammals if they can catch them, but this is such an inefficient way for them to eat that it's not a viable alternative for the expenditure of energy that it would require.

Animals may not be geniuses by anything close to any human definition, but to label their inability to shift food sources and reproductive habits based on a catastrophic elimination of their habitat as "stupid" is, well...stupid.

pestossimo:

"What does this have to do with Fiat"?

I don't know, you tell me. Do Pandas drive Fiats?, if not, what do Fiats have to do with Pandas. Is it some reference to Fiat being "Darwin-ed" out of business ?

The fact is that some animals are far more adaptable than Pandas. Take coyotes for instance. We pretty much completely invaded their habitat and instead of dying off in job lots they're doing just fine. Some people think they're actually doing better now than they were. Crows\Ravens and seagulls are another good example, along with lots of types of insects.

Anyway, it's at least partially right to say that pandas are one of the less "advanced" (read adaptable) species out there. I'm not saying that they probably wouldn't have had a fairly good run if humans hadn't come along. It just seems like they're not good at adapting to new situations and handling new food sources. Even other types of bears (brown and black bears mainly) have done fairly well with humans encroaching on their territory simply because they're much more omnivorous and adaptable than the panda, which pretty much has a single food source it seems to latch onto.

Crosscheck42: Giant Pandas aren't hunters.

Giant Pandas do occasionally eat small mammals if they can catch them, but this is such an inefficient way for them to eat that it's not a viable alternative for the expenditure of energy that it would require.

Jeff_from_MD: THey can eat berries, wild meat, human treats, anything in fact...so they just eat what's there

So to summarize, pandas suck.

ForTheWin
The fact is that some animals are far more adaptable than Pandas. Take coyotes for instance. We pretty much completely invaded their habitat and instead of dying off in job lots they're doing just fine. Some people think they're actually doing better now than they were. Crows\Ravens and seagulls are another good example, along with lots of types of insects.

The species you listed are also species that exist largely as scavengers that have adapted to feed upon the detritus of human society. Be it roadkill or garbage, those food sources are abundant and relatively risk-free.

And none of the species you mentioned had a habitat as unique and isolated as the Giant Panda.

However, your point about adaptation is absolutely true. If I gave the impression that I thought otherwise, I apologize.

Giant Pandas are certainly less adaptable than the rest of their ursine cousins. However, those (with the exception of the Polar Bear, which is a pure carnivore) bear species have always been omnivorous simply because they had to eat lots of different types of things to fulfill their nutritional requirements. There is no single food source that could meet that need in their ecosystem.

If Black Bears, to pick a bear species at random, could have lived exclusively on a single food source with little to no competition, it's possible that they would have adapted a dependency on that food source just as the Giant Panda did with bamboo.

Further, nearly all of the other bear species in the world hibernate when their food sources dry up. Giant Pandas do not. They eat bamboo 10-12 hours a day, all year round. The Giant Panda does not have the fat storage capacity that other bear species have, so they walk a thin line every day between expending energy on a pretty inefficient food source or exhausting their limited energy supply by trying to find a different source of food.

This is also a big reason why they are so poor at adaptation.

For Coyotes, to use the example you used, they only needed to adapt a behavior that allowed whichever Coyotes that were the least afraid of humans to survive. By that, I mean that whichever members of a particular pack of Coyotes that were willing to approach closest to the settlements of man and thus feed upon their waste, were the animals that got to eat and thus survive to pass on their genetic material. This is how Wolves and Coyotes evolved into the common dog, and it's also why the common dog exhibits such an attachment to humans. It was selected into them via evolution.

I'm not saying that the Giant Panda is as smart as a dog or a Coyote. But bears are pretty smart when it comes to food. Try hiding your food when you go camping in an area where Black Bears are and see how long it takes them to find it.

But keep in mind that the Giant Panda doesn't have this alternative food source readily available to draw from. And even if such an alternative did exist, most of them would die before they found it because they can't travel that far without being near a source of food. Now factor in the fragmentation of their habitat, poaching, and the occasional bamboo flower and die-off and you see why there's only 1500 of them left in the wild.

You can't call an animal stupid if they can't find an alternative food source where one doesn't exist. They lack the mobility to find a new source of food.

Yeah, I don't mean that pandas as a species are stupid, because that's a pretty retarded thing to say. It's not like some panda way back in panda history convinced all the other pandas to put all their hopes on one fairly fragile plant. I'm just saying that as a species pandas are remarkably ill suited to handle a large destruction of a portion of their food source. Since they only eat bamboo, for the most part, the destruction of that one food is devastating to them. I'd argue that even if humans hadn't come around the panda would be a much more short lived species (relatively speaking) than, say, the brown bear (which eats damn near everything). Even polar bears have it better because it's not like they only eat one kind of meat. Pretty much any other animal they run into they'll maul and then digest (and they've evolved to be extremely efficient hunters, unlike pandas). I'm sure pandas would adapt if gradual change started erasing bamboo but I doubt they would do it as well as other bears species have.

WOW, they just announced that the Panda may have another baby (twin) in a few days. So, if my math is correct, that's $1 mil for the mom, $1 mil for the pop, $600 thousand for each of the two cubs. That's $3.2 million per year to China for having these animals on exhibit. That's a tough nut for any zoo to crack. No wonder Zoo Atlanta is trying to get out of the lease.

Pandas are incredibly noisy newborns. My dog wants excedrin.

"More people have watched Pandas fark than Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee."

--Barry Ween, Boy Genius