There is no better animal to get people through a zoo turnstile than a giant panda. WWF’s logo is a panda and the panda is one of China’s national icons but what is it about the panda that makes them so popular?
The answer may lie in their eating habits. It is a commonly known fact that giant pandas feed almost exclusively on tough bamboo stalks. This has led to the necessity for a strong jaw and enlarged jaw muscles giving pandas their distinctive friendly round face.
Their bamboo eating habit also makes them appear gentle. A panda after all is a bear but, as it is mostly vegetarian it seems far less vicious than the polar bear, with its innate taste for human flesh, or the salmon catching grizzly; which makes them, probably unwisely, feel more approachable.
Furthermore, the panda’s unusual colouring adds to an element of mystery making them all the more interesting. The true reason why pandas are black and white is unknown. Tibetan folklore tells of four shepherdesses who were killed when they tried to save the completely white panda from a leopard. In honour of the dead they attended the funeral wearing black armbands. The tears they cried in sorrow caused the armbands to run creating their distinctive black markings.
Scientists have multiple different theories as to why pandas are black and white. One theory is that pandas are black and white so that they stand out in the forest enabling them to easily find a mate. Conversely, others have argued that their black and white colouring acts as camouflage making them hard to find in treetops or areas of bamboo.
The panda’s elusiveness also tantalises our curiosity. The first European didn’t see a panda until the French Priest and Naturalist Armand David saw one in 1869. Furthermore, in China there is mention of panda like animals but, there are no pandas sketched, painted or glazed onto imperial vases. Consequently, the relative novelty and the rarity of seeing a panda led to huge interest in the late 19th and early 20th century.
This didn’t necessarily prove beneficial for pandas. Many naturalists used local hunters to provide panda skins and skeletons to allow the anatomical study of a panda. What’s more, as with everything in the Western World of the early 20th Century, the game was on to ultimately conquer this coy beast and be the first westerner to shoot one; a task which was completed by Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, Theodore Jr. and Kermit, on 13th April 1929.
This practice heightened the mystery surrounding this fabulous bear as specimens sent back to Europe and the USA caused an intense debate as to whether the panda was a bear or not. When Armand David sent his panda to the Muséum National de Histoire Naturelle in Paris he sent a note with it calling it a “black and white bear”. However, Parisian zoologist Alphonse Milne-Edwards thought it instead bore resemblance to the red panda. Therefore, instead of grouping the panda with the bear family, Urisidae, he classed it with the red pandas in the Ailuridae family. This debate wasn’t solved until as recently as 2010 when a paper published in Nature showed that data obtained from sequencing the panda genome proved the panda to be, inarguably, a bear.
So a panda’s good lucks, gentle nature and mystery make it appealing but, we also have a sense of responsibility towards pandas. This may be because the panda is now the face of conservation thanks to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) logo. However, the panda does have a definite cause.
Destruction of habitat and increased human population have led to there now only being between 2500-3000 pandas left in the mountains of Western China. This has led to huge conservation efforts such as loans of pandas from China to zoos to fund protection for those left in the wild. For this reason many individuals paying for tickets for zoos, such as Edinburgh, are paying in part for the upkeep of the captive pandas, associated breeding programmes and conservation efforts. Moreover, many people (including myself) choose to donate to the pandas cause less passively by sponsoring pandas through charities such as WWF.
So there are many reasons why we love pandas and it is a good job we do; as if these wonderful bears weren’t so beguiling I’m not sure our children would get to enjoy them too.
Miss Craddock's Science Voyage 