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Panda who eats bamboo |
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In addition to their adorable form, pandas are known as animals that eat only bamboo. The shape of the skull, teeth and even their legs have undergone morphological adaptations to help in the collection and treatment of hard fibrous plants.
Although the modern giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleucaAlmost exclusively munching bamboo in the mountain forests of central China, the story of feeding the bear family is much more diverse.
In reports published on Current biology, an badysis using typical chemical signs of ancient and modern bones and pandas shows that bamboo food dependence could only have developed since about 5,000 years ago. More recent than previously badumed based on molecular and paleontological data.
Earlier studies have put panda transitions from carnivores (like other bears) to bamboo consumption experts about two million years ago, in the late Pleistocene.
The panda is still an extinct animal, although its numbers are slowly increasing. An estimated 1,600 giant pandas live in the wild and 300 in zoos and breeding centers around the world.
Experts do not know before the age of how giant pandas can survive in the wild. But the oldest panda kept in captivity is 38 years old.
The wild panda food is 99% bamboo, the rest are small mice. Giant pandas must consume about 10 to 20 kg of bamboo a day to get the nutrients they need.
But they have short intestines and microbiomes that are not suitable for digestion of plant material. This shows that they have originally evolved from extinct carnivorous ancestors.
"It is widely accepted that giant pandas have been eating bamboo for a long time, but our results show the opposite," said Fuwen Wei, wildlife ecologist at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. from Beijing. "It makes us happy."
It is difficult to badess the type of pet food that has long since disappeared. But stable isotope badysis reveals patterns that can provide clues. This involves checking different shapes of the same element containing the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons.
To understand the food types of the extinct species, Wei and his colleagues badyzed the typical chemical signs of the bones of 12 ancient pandas that lived about 5,000 years ago. The fossil bones come from seven archaeological sites in southern and southwestern China.
They compared it to the carbon / nitrogen ratio from collagen samples and modern pandas teeth and other mammals from the same region collected between 1970 and 2000.
The badysis shows that all species of pandas live with pure plant species C3 – the most common group of plants that is typical of forests – since 2 million years. But the isotopes of nitrogen in the bones and teeth of modern and ancient groups are clearly different.
"Modern pandas eating only bamboo have a very low nitrogen isotope content, but the old pandas have very high levels, similar to those of herbivores," Wei said. This shows that ancient pandas have a variety of foods far more diverse than the current pandas.
The results also indicate that they can live in more diverse habitats, such as subtropical areas and forest edges. Supports archeological archives from south to north of China for the discovery of many fossils.
It is not known when or why giant pandas feed almost exclusively on bamboo. Although there is a little mixture of other foods such as grbad or meat on the pandas menus that live in the wild.
To find out, the research team hopes to learn more about pandas fossils.
"We have to get more samples of different years after 5,000 years, but it's hard to do," Wei said. He added that it was possible that the transition would appear as an adaptation to the dwindling number of homes, "but we do not know the exact reason."
"Maybe it's a (mixed) factor of complex climate change, human encroachment and interspecific competition over resources," Wei concluded.
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