Giant panda specialized food

The giant pandas belong to the flesh-eating animals, but 99% of their food is the twenty-some bamboos that grow in the high mountains and the deep valleys. With the changes of the seasons, the kinds of the bamboos and the parts in the recipe of the giant pandas are different. They like the bamboo shoots best. 

From spring to summer, they like to live on the bamboo shoots of the Qiong bamboo, some bamboos of the madake bamboo category, the wood bamboos in Bashan, the walking stick bamboos, the Huaxi arrow bamboos and the big arrow bamboos. The bamboo shoots are the new trunks of the bamboos that have no branches or leaves and grow from the underground caudexes bamboo roots, the organization is very small and tender, and the water content is abundant. The nutrition components: the raw fat is 1.27%, the raw fiber is 33.62%, the crude protein is 10.32%, and the general quantity of sugar is 26.15%. The bamboo shoots are small and tender and they are succulent which taste good and are easy to be digested and absorbed and they are dainty dishes for the giant pandas. From spring to autumn every year, in order to eat the different kinds of bamboos and bamboo shoots of different heights above sea level, the giant pandas will look for food from the middle mountains to the high mountains, which is called ‘the chasing of the bamboo shoots’.

As for the bamboo as a whole, the content of the nutrition components is increasing gradually from the bottom of the trunks of the bamboos to the top. Take the cold arrow bamboos for example, the raw fat of the bamboo pole is 0.59%, and that of the bamboo branches is 3.37%; the crude protein of the bamboo pole is 4.20%, and that of the bamboo leaves is 19.44%; the raw fiber of the bamboo pole is 46.66%, and that of the bamboo leaves is 24.27%. It is obvious that the giant pandas prefer the bamboo shoots, but it is reasonable for them to live on the bamboo leaves and the upper bamboo poles of the young bamboos that grow within a year.

The giant pandas living in the wild will look for other plants as their food once in a while, such as the beardless wheat, the corns, the equisetum, the green thatch grass, the multi-hole gill fungus, the wild angelicas, the notoperygium roots, the barks of the young firs, etc. They even act out of normal behavior that they will pick up the dead bodies of the animals and eat them or catch the small animals as their food.