What foods do pandas eat?

The giant panda’s diet usually consists of bamboo shoots, stems, branches and leaves, and varies with the season and mountain range.

Spring

Giant pandas love to eat bamboo shoots most in spring and summer. The season when bamboo shoots are unearthed varies with bamboo species, mountain systems and altitude. The earliest bamboo shoots were unearthed from the Liangshan Mountains, the latest from the Qinling Mountains, and the Minshan and Qionglai Mountains were in the middle.
There are actually only two kinds of bamboos that are the staple food of giant pandas in the Qinling Mountains, and only one type of bamboo shoots, the Bashan wood bamboo, is the staple food. Bashan wood bamboo is widely distributed, ranging from 1100 to 2100 meters above sea level. It is mainly unearthed from April to May. During this period, giant pandas basically eat Bashan wood bamboo shoots as their staple food, and they begin to transition to eating some Qinling arrow bamboo shoots in June.
In the northern section of the Minshan Mountains where giant pandas are distributed, such as in the Tangjiahe Nature Reserve, the bamboo shoots of Aralia truncatula bloom from April to May, and the shoots of Arrow bamboo with short buds and Qingchuan arrow bamboo grow from June to July. Therefore, the spring and summer diet of giant pandas in this area is composed of In April, bamboo shoots started to dominate and gradually transitioned to bamboo shoots and bamboo stems. In the southern section of Minshan Mountain, the bamboo shoots of A. truncatula and A. cantilata are unearthed from April to June, while the short-cone Yumangosteen is unearthed from June to July. Therefore, the diet of giant pandas begins with bamboo shoots as the main food in April, and gradually transitions to the proportion of bamboo stems that are also eaten in July.
The Qionglai Mountains are relatively high and the river valleys are subject to heavy human interference. At an altitude of more than 2,000 meters, bamboo shoots are produced from April to May, bamboo shoots from short-cone Yushan bamboo are produced from June to August, and August bamboo and spiny bamboo shoots are unearthed from September to October. In the northern section of Wolong, giant pandas mainly eat bamboo shoots from April to May, bamboo shoots and bamboo stems from June to July, and bamboo stems from August to September. The autumn shoots of August bamboo and spiny bamboo are the main items in the autumn diet. Element.
Giant pandas in Daxiangling like to feed on the bamboo shoots of August bamboo, spiny bamboo and short-cone Yumangosteen. From summer to autumn, giant pandas here eat three kinds of food: bamboo shoots, bamboo stems and branches and leaves.
Giant pandas like to eat the bamboo shoots of short-cone Yumangosteen, asbestos Yumangosteen, hollow-stemmed Yumangosteen and Ere bamboo from the Xiaoxiangling Mountains. Their diet from May to July basically consists of the bamboo shoots and stems of these bamboos.
There are more bamboo species in the Liangshan Mountains for giant pandas to eat bamboo shoots. Bamboo shoots of three species of bamboos (Qiong bamboo, March bamboo, and large-leaf Qiong bamboo) have been unearthed from low mountains since April, and then from May to August, there are strong wind bamboo shoots, Mabian Yumangosteen, and White-backed Yushan bamboo. Bamboo shoots are unearthed, and in the autumn from September to October, bamboo shoots such as August bamboo and spiny bamboo are unearthed. Therefore, the diet of giant pandas in Liangshan from April to October is different from that of giant pandas in other places.

Summer

The mountain systems where giant pandas are distributed have short summers, mainly from July to August. At this time, the diets of giant pandas vary from place to place. Except for elderly individuals, giant pandas generally have the largest proportion of bamboo stems in their summer diet. In Qinling Mountains and Liangshan, due to the long bamboo shoot period, the proportion of bamboo shoots in the diet is about 30% to 40%, and the proportion of bamboo stems is 60% to 70%. In the other mountain systems, more than 70% is bamboo stems, with bamboo shoots or a small amount of bamboo. leaf. Young giant pandas feed almost entirely on bamboo stems in summer, while older individuals rarely eat bamboo stems due to serious tooth wear. Juvenile giant pandas also eat less bamboo stems in their diets, and the proportion gradually increases as sub-adults.

Autumn

Autumn is also short in the mountain systems where giant pandas are distributed, only from September to October. However, almost all giant pandas in each mountain system feed on newly grown bamboo leaves, and only a small amount of bamboo shoots or stems are included in the diet. Only Liangshan has August bamboo and spiny bamboo unearthed in autumn, so the diet of giant pandas there accounts for 50% to 60% of bamboo shoots, with 4% to 50% of bamboo stems remaining.

Winter

Winter is very long in the mountain systems where giant pandas are distributed, generally from October to March of the next year, and the climate is severely cold. At this time, most of the giant pandas went down to the lower mountains to feed on bamboo leaves. However, in Minshan and Qionglai Mountains, because the lower mountains and river valleys had been reduced to agricultural land, they could only feed on the withered bamboo leaves in the middle mountains. Or all of them feed on the old bamboo shoots (young bamboos that have not sprouted branches) in the high mountains, while the old individuals still feed on the cold withered bamboo leaves in the middle and low mountains.
Perhaps because southerners and northerners have different eating habits, giant pandas in different regions have different dietary compositions. In the Qinling Mountains, bamboo leaves are the most important ingredient in the diet of giant pandas. Giant pandas here only eat a small amount of bamboo stems in late winter and early spring. In mountain systems such as Minshan and Qionglai, bamboo stems are the most important ingredient in giant panda diets. The differences in the annual diet composition of giant pandas in different districts reflect the differences in bamboo species types and phenological conditions, and are the ecological adaptation of giant pandas to local environmental conditions.
For giant pandas, March to May every year is the harshest “ecological season”, when food is scarce, body condition declines, and most deaths occur during this period. In addition, food scarcity may also have contributed to the out-migration of individual giant pandas.