Pandas                                                         

High in dense bamboo forests in the misty, rainy mountains of China lives one of the world’s rarest mammals: the giant panda, also called the panda. Only about 1000 of these black-and-white relatives of bears survive in the wild. Pandas eat almost nothing but bamboo shoots and leaves. Occasionally they eat other vegetation, fish, or small animals, but bamboo accounts for 99 percent of their diets. Pandas eat fast, they eat a lot, and they spend about 12 hours a day doing it.

They digest only about a fifth of what they eat. Overall, bamboo is not very nutritious. The shoots and leaves are the most valuable parts of the plants, so that’s what a well-fed pandas concentrate on eating. To stay healthy, they eat a lot-up to 15 percent of their body weight in 12 hours-so they eat fast.

 Pandas’ molars are very broad and flat. The shape of these teeth helps the animal crush the bamboo shoots, leaves, and stems they eat. To get the bamboo to their mouths, they hold the stems with their front paws, which have enlarged wrist bones that act as thumbs for gripping.

Pandas are shy; they don’t venture into areas where people live. This restricts pandas to very limited areas. As people continue to farm, log, and develop land higher and higher up the mountain slopes the pandas’ habitat continues to shrink.

There are probably only about 1000 giant pandas left in the wild. They are classified as an endangered species.