Adorable creatures, but... we've done just about everything imaginable to make them reproduce faster. They'd rather just sit around and eat bamboo. If they don't want to survive as a species, then there's not much we can do for them.

Imagine being a census taker for that job.

TV's Vinnie: Imagine being a census taker for that job.
[www11.onrpg.com image 440x465]

I really don't want to know where the other end of that stick is.

So ... did deforestation and poaching inadvertently kill all the sexually desirable male pandas? Or the sexually desirable female pandas?

Because if aliens destroyed earth and dropped me in a cage on Omicron Persei 8, with naught for companionship but some corn-fed hose beast fresh off a farm in Bumfark, Missourah, I'm pretty sure humanity would be facing the same population problem.

/similarly, if it were me and Scarlett Johansson in that cage.
//I would chase her around that cage somethin' *fierce*. But I'm pretty sure she'd rather eat bamboo.

Question #4

How many of your young have you eaten this year?
[ ] 1-2
[ ] 3-4
[ ] 5-6
[ ] I sold my child for bamboo

/crack heads of the animal kingdom

I have to fill out a census form?

That depends on if the pandas have sided with the horde or the alliance.

Marine1: Adorable creatures, but... we've done just about everything imaginable to make them reproduce faster. They'd rather just sit around and eat bamboo. If they don't want to survive as a species, then there's not much we can do for them.

Jebus.

The giant panda is an endangered species, threatened by continued habitat loss and by a very low birthrate, both in the wild and in captivity.[25] (new window)

Yes, we must make them reproduce faster than they are biologically capable of doing so we can continue to turn their habitat into plastic crap factories and electronic waste recycling centers and the survivors can be crammed into cages in zoos so ignorant urban zeks can gawk at them. After all, 1.3 billion Chinese is not enough; that habitat could be put to much more productive uses, such as the housing of yet more millions upon millions of Chinese. Lord knows there aren't enough.

There's a certain number of pandas who don't fill out the forms. Some of them are there illegally, too.

You just feed them bamboo and they'll pretty much do whatever you want.

Marine1: Adorable creatures, but... we've done just about everything imaginable to make them reproduce faster. They'd rather just sit around and eat bamboo. If they don't want to survive as a species, then there's not much we can do for them.

That's a right-wing anti-conservation myth that's on the level of "evolution is a theory". It also fails basic research and understanding of biology. It's also classic "blame the victim". Come to think of it, these issues are all related.

The panda is a bear that adapted to eat bamboo. It's got the teeth, gut and intestines of a carnivore with a vegan diet. This means even though it eats almost constantly for every waking hour, it's getting very little energy from its food. That'll be attacked as a "weakness" justifying their extinction, but there are some HUGE advantages to this; bamboo is (was) everywhere and grows quickly, whereas energy-intensive hunting can lead to starvation if you're not good enough at it. Basically, as a slow-moving bear the panda did better converting to a plant diet. If it tried to stay carnivorous it would've gone extinct when everything it tried to catch could outrun it. Instead it adapted to eat something that's everywhere and doesn't run away. It has a symbiotic relationship with microbes in its gut that can break down bamboo (analogous to termites). Everything from the fur coat to the shape of the head to its metabolism is adapted to conserve energy. The panda is highly specialized and very good at what it does.

But that slow metabolism means the panda can't reproduce quickly. Rapid reproduction (farking, pregnancy, nursing) requires a lot of energy, something that goes against the panda's survival. Copulation's done in as little as 30 seconds, and the female panda will gestate for five months to give birth to a whopping four-ounce cub that's utterly helpless. If it has twins it abandons one to improve the chances of at least one surviving.

Humans are getting impatient with the pandas, but it's really only showing their ignorance. The pandas instinctively conserve energy; it's how they've survived for millions of years. Try to get a panda to emulate the Duggars and both mother and offspring will literally starve to death. Now you've got fewer pandas than when you started.

If NOT for humans, the panda would be just fine. Its adaptations are actually ideal for a species like ours; a low birth rate, slow metabolism and a diet of fast-growing plants means minimal risk of resource depletion (though I'd rather not crap fiber 40 times a day). If not for humans, pandas would be living a life of abundance. Frankly, the pandas really don't need much to thrive so it's pretty damning that we can even fark up a species that subsists on bamboo.

I usually side with the environmentalists on most issues but this question nags at me a lot.

We treat every extinction as a failure of humanity. I have two issues with this. Firstly we have no idea how man species there are, we can only estimate. Secondly there really is no such thing a 'new' species, simply meaning that changes are so small that each generation is the same species as the previous generation but maybe not the same as it's forbears from multiple generations before it. How can we say with any certainty that every extinction is a 'bad' thing? I mean sure biodiversity is a good thing but we live in an ever changing world and new species will pop up and old ones will die off as a matter of course, at what point do we draw the line and say, 'this was inevitable.' We often make the mistake of removing humanity from the natural world but we are part of the natural world.

Surely we should be careful of using our immense power to alter our world at the risk of destroying biodiversity but it's not as if extinction would halt if we were to disappear.

They offer a free, round-trip business class ticket for every completed form.

Egoy3k: I usually side with the environmentalists on most issues but this question nags at me a lot.

We treat every extinction as a failure of humanity. I have two issues with this. Firstly we have no idea how man species there are, we can only estimate. Secondly there really is no such thing a 'new' species, simply meaning that changes are so small that each generation is the same species as the previous generation but maybe not the same as it's forbears from multiple generations before it. How can we say with any certainty that every extinction is a 'bad' thing? I mean sure biodiversity is a good thing but we live in an ever changing world and new species will pop up and old ones will die off as a matter of course, at what point do we draw the line and say, 'this was inevitable.' We often make the mistake of removing humanity from the natural world but we are part of the natural world.

Surely we should be careful of using our immense power to alter our world at the risk of destroying biodiversity but it's not as if extinction would halt if we were to disappear.

Species are defined as two populations so different that they cannot mate and produce offspring anymore. They are not arbitrarily small differences. The arbitrary small differences are called races or varieties.

We can't read DNA and each species is like books of DNA. Saying let species be extinct is like saying burn a book from the library since I can't read it yet. What if the book you burnt is the manual to cure cancer?

Egoy3k: I usually side with the environmentalists on most issues but this question nags at me a lot. We treat every extinction as a failure of humanity. I have two issues with this. Firstly we have no idea how man species there are, we can only estimate. Secondly there really is no such thing a 'new' species, simply meaning that changes are so small that each generation is the same species as the previous generation but maybe not the same as it's forbears from multiple generations before it. How can we say with any certainty that every extinction is a 'bad' thing? I mean sure biodiversity is a good thing but we live in an ever changing world and new species will pop up and old ones will die off as a matter of course, at what point do we draw the line and say, 'this was inevitable.' We often make the mistake of removing humanity from the natural world but we are part of the natural world. Surely we should be careful of using our immense power to alter our world at the risk of destroying biodiversity but it's not as if extinction would halt if we were to disappear.

It's the rate and scope that matter. Huge areas of the world - especially in the temperate zones - have been converted to virtually exclusive human use...vast areas of farmland, even vaster areas used for livestock grazing, immense areas of urbanization (nature completely destroyed) largely in biologically productive littoral zones, huge areas logged or otherwise stripped of old growth, heritage vegetation, and even the exploitation of vast areas of the oceans themselves (including trawling the seafloor). Some areas have been completely and, practically-speaking, permanently altered by human activities, like the shores of the Mediterranean Basin and the (once) Fertile Crescent, for example. Here we are talking about China, where virtually the entire country has been overrun and used by humans for centuries - very little wilderness remains there.

Ask yourself this: Given the amount of land converted to virtual exclusive human use, especially during the Industrial Era and its attendant human population explosion, do you think humans have more than likely vastly increased the rate of extinctions above the natural, background rate? Given the continued growth of the human population and the attendant continued, accelerating exploitation of land and resources, do you think a sort of biological holocaust is underway?

I think so. I think we're living through the most profound disaster to occur on Earth in the last 60 million years, it is caused by the human population explosion, and most people just don't get it or just don't care. I also think the consequences of this biological holocaust will ultimately be very bad for our own species. And unfortunately, the prospects of it being halted or even slowed down are dim.

I feel like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that won't screw to save its species.
I want to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I'll never see.
I want to breathe smoke.

In the race section all the pandas checked Asian, except for the one joker who marked "Mixed". He defended it by saying, "Hey, after all I am half black."

joeflood: Don't worry. Mass animal extinctions will include most of the human race. It's a self-correcting issue.

The sad thing is that these corrections are always far more painful than they ever need to be for the sole reason that we don't know when to stop.

How do they get pandas to fill out the forms? NRFU.

Pandas love filling out forms. They take great comfort in seeing it all laid out in black and white.