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Herbivore

GIANT PANDA

There are two giant pandas here at Edinburgh Zoo – Yang Guang and Tian Tian. Yang Guang is our male panda whose name means Sunshine in Mandarin and Tian Tian is our female panda whose name means Sweetie. Both pandas were born in August 2003.

They are the only giant pandas in the UK and have lived here since 2011 as part of a 10 year agreement between our charity, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS), and the China Wildlife Conservation Association . We were thrilled to be able to extend Yang Guang and Tian Tian’s stay here at Edinburgh Zoo until 2023.

Our team are working with our colleagues at the China Wildlife Conservation Association to plan Yang Guang and Tian Tian’s return to China which will be in December of this year. Indoor viewing will close at the end of November.

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We will be providing as many opportunities as possible for people to say goodbye and celebrate the tremendous impact these two charismatic bears have had on our communities , helping to create a world where nature is protected, valued and loved. Find out more about our giant panda farewell.

FUN FACTS

99% of a giant panda’s diet consists of different types of bamboo – Yang Guang can eat up to 100kg of bamboo every day!
They are largely solitary but they do communicate through calls and scent marking and occasionally meet outside of the mating season
Female pandas are only able to conceive for two to three days a year. This short mating season makes successful breeding very difficult
An adult panda is roughly 900 times bigger than a new-born cub

Did you know that £55 would buy lunch for one of the pandas? You can help care for Yang Guang and Tian Tian, and protect threatened animals around the world, by donating today – if you can, please support our Survival Fund.

VISITING THE PANDAS

You do not need to book a separate panda viewing time slot in addition to your zoo admission tickets – though you may have to queue as this pair are very popular!
Animal exhibits may be closed to visitors without notice and at anytime for animal welfare reasons. We cannot guarantee you will see all of the animals, or a specific animal, on your visit

No flash photography is allowed. Please make sure you know how to turn your flash off

The pandas are active both day and night but as their activity patterns can vary each day, and with the changing seasons, there is no guarantee that they will be active at a particular time
We will be providing as many opportunities as possible for people to say goodbye in 2023. Find out more about our giant panda farewell .
For further information about visiting Edinburgh Zoo, please visit our Visitor Information page

While p ositive developments for giant pandas in recent years include their IUCN status changing from endangered to vulnerable , there are fewer than 2,000 giant pandas left in the wild and their habitat is in decline.

Yang Guan and Tian Tian are part of a vital international breeding programme and we have been playing an important role in giant panda conservation, education and research – providing expertise in areas including nutrition, genetics and veterinary medicine, as well as financial support to protect their native environment.

Like all the animals in our care , our pandas play a critically important role in attracting and engaging hundreds of thousands of visitors each year so they can learn about the threats animals face in the wild and the action they can take to help. T heir power to connect with people with nature and encourage behaviour change is invaluable.

Each visit to Edinburgh Zoo also supports conservation, research and education here in Scotland and around the world. You can help care for our animals and protect wildlife around the world by visiting our p arks, joining RZSS as a member, adopting your favourite species and much more.

Find out more at edinburghzoo.org.uk/help

Status

Not Endangered NE

Data Deficient DD

Least Concern LC

Near Threatened NT

Vulnerable VU

Endangered EN

Critically Endangered CR

Extinct in the wild EW

Extinct EX

Vulnerable

For more info on classifications visit www.iucnredist.org

Size

Relative to 6ft (2m) man

Population

to 1000
Population is increasing, IUCN April 2016

Habitat

Woodland
Mountain regions

Diet

Herbivore

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Geographic ranges of living species of bears

giant panda, (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), bearlike mammal inhabiting bamboo forests in the mountains of central China. Its striking coat of black and white, combined with a bulky body and round face, gives it a captivating appearance that has endeared it to people worldwide. According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, fewer than 1,900 pandas are thought to remain in the wild.

giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca)

Large males may attain 1.8 metres (6 feet) in length and weigh more than 100 kg (220 pounds); females are usually smaller. Round black ears and black eye patches stand out against a white face and neck. Black limbs, tail, legs, and shoulders contrast with the white torso. The rear paws point inward, which gives pandas a waddling gait. Pandas can easily stand on their hind legs and are commonly observed somersaulting, rolling, and dust-bathing. Although somewhat awkward as climbers, pandas readily ascend trees and, on the basis of their resemblance to bears, are probably capable of swimming. An unusual anatomic characteristic is an enlarged wrist bone that functions somewhat like a thumb, enabling pandas to handle food with considerable dexterity.

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Natural history

giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca)

giant panda

As much as 90–98 percent of the panda’s diet consists of the leaves, shoots, and stems of bamboo, a large grass available year-round in much of China’s forested regions. Despite adaptations in the forepaws, teeth, and jaws for bamboo consumption, the giant panda has retained the digestive system of its carnivore ancestry and is therefore unable to digest cellulose, a main constituent of bamboo. Pandas solve this problem by rapidly passing prodigious quantities of the grass through their digestive tracts on a daily basis. As much as 16 out of every 24 hours is spent feeding, and elimination of wastes occurs up to 50 times per day. Fossilized dental remains indicate that the giant panda committed to bamboo as its principal food source at least three million years ago. Although unable to capture prey, pandas retain a taste for meat, which is used as bait to capture them for radio collaring and has made them pests in human camps on occasion. The species cannot naturally survive outside bamboo forests, though in captivity they have been maintained on cereals, milk, and garden fruits and vegetables. Bamboo is the healthier diet for captive pandas.

panda sleeping

The giant panda’s solitary nature is underscored by its reliance on its sense of smell (olfaction). Each animal confines its activities to a range of about 4 to 6 square km (1.5 to 2.3 square miles), but these home ranges often overlap substantially. Under this arrangement scent functions in regulating contact between individuals. A large scent gland located just below the tail and surrounding the anus is used to leave olfactory messages for other pandas. The gland is rubbed against trees, rocks, and clumps of grass, with scent conveying information on identity, sex, and possibly social status of the marking individual. Chemical analysis of marks is consistent with a difference in function for males and females. Males appear to use scent to identify the areas where they live, whereas females primarily use it for signaling estrus. Except for the mothers’ care of infants, the only social activity of pandas takes place during females’ estrus, which occurs annually during the spring and lasts one to three days. A spring mating season (March–May) and a fall birth season (August–September) are seen in both wild and captive populations. Males appear to locate females first by scent and ultimately by vocalizations. Assemblages of one to five males per female have been recorded. At this time males may become highly aggressive as they compete for the opportunity to mate.

giant panda cub (Ailuropoda melanoleuca)

Like bears, giant pandas undergo a delay in implantation of the fertilized ovum into the wall of the uterus, a period of two to three months after mating. Hormone levels in females’ urine indicate that the period of embryonic/fetal growth and development lasts only about two months. Altogether, gestation averages 135 days (with a range of 90–184 days), but, because of the short growth phase, a term fetus weighs only about 112 grams (4 ounces) on average. Relative to the mother, giant pandas produce the smallest offspring of any placental mammal (about 1/800 of the mother’s weight). For the first two to three weeks of life, the mother uses her forepaws and her thumblike wrist bones to cuddle and position the infant against herself in a rather uncarnivore-like and almost human fashion. Nearly half of the 133 captive births recorded before 1998 were of twins, but panda mothers are typically unable to care for more than one infant. Reasons for the extremely small size of the offspring and the frequent production of twins are not understood, but both are traits shared with bears.

The newborn panda is blind and covered with only a thin all-white coat. It is virtually helpless, being able only to suckle and vocalize. It depends on its mother for warmth, nourishment, positioning at the breast, and stimulating the passage of wastes. Development is slow during the early months. Eyes begin to open at about 45 days, and the first wobbly steps are taken at 75–80 days. Its helpless state mandates birth in a den, an environment in which it lives for the first 100–120 days of life. By about 14 months, at which age the milk teeth have erupted, the infant readily consumes bamboo, and at 18–24 months weaning from the mother takes place. Separation from the mother must occur before a female can undertake the production of her next litter. Captive pandas may live beyond 30 years in captivity, but life span in the wild is estimated at about 20 years.

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Conservation and classification

Fossils from northern Myanmar and Vietnam and much of China as far north as Beijing indicate that the giant panda was widely distributed throughout eastern Asia during the early Pleistocene Epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). Human destruction of its forest habitat, combined with poaching, has restricted the species to remote fragments of mountain habitat along the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan (Szechwan), Shaanxi (Shensi), and Gansu (Kansu). The total area of these habitats is about 13,000 square km (5,000 square miles), and in recent times periodic mass flowering and die-offs of bamboo have brought starvation for some populations. (Five to 10 years are required for bamboo forests to recover from these natural events.) Since the 1990s China has greatly expanded its conservation efforts, and it now regards the panda as a national treasure. The reserve system has been expanded from 14 sites to more than 40, and cooperative international arrangements were implemented to provide training in reserve management and captive breeding. The panda had long been considered an endangered species by the IUCN, but the environmental organization changed the status of the panda to “ vulnerable” in 2016, because of China’s success in restoring bamboo forest habitat.

Prior eras of giving pandas as gifts and of short-term commercial loans to zoos have given way to lending agreements that generate funds for preservation of the wild population. More than 120 pandas are maintained in captivity in China, and another 15 to 20 are found in zoos elsewhere. Captive populations are increasing. Su-Lin, the first of the giant pandas to be exhibited in the West, reached the United States as an infant in 1936 and was a popular attraction at the Brookfield Zoo, near Chicago, until its death in 1938. No European observed a live giant panda in the wild until the Walter Stötzner expedition of 1913–15, although Armand David, a Vincentian missionary, discovered some panda furs in 1869.

The classification of giant pandas has long been a subject of controversy. Anatomic, behavioral, and biochemical data have been used to place pandas with bears (family Ursidae), with raccoons (Procyonidae), or in a family of their own (Ailuridae). Improved molecular analyses made during the 1990s strongly suggest bears as the giant panda’s closest relatives, and many of their behavioral and reproductive characteristics are consistent with this placement.

Newborn Panda (Baby Panda) Photos

The giant pandas are also called black and white panda bears, but, do they always in black and white? In fact, a newborn panda looks very different from its mom. It weights three to five ounces. Pink, hairless and blind, the cub is 1/900th the size of its mother. Except for a marsupial (suck as kangaroo or opossum), baby pandas are the smallest newborn mammals relative to their mother’s size.

The cubs soon develop soft gray fur which becomes coarser and develops its black and white pattern in a month. Cubs rely on mother’s milk for the first year, but start to eat bamboo after six months. Cubs easily die in the wild because they are so small and defenseless. The panda mommy has to leave them alone in the den to eat for four hours a day.

Viewing the following newborn panda and its childhood photos, you can have a better understanding the big change of the newborn pandas, growing from little to big, from pink to black and white in color. your heart will full of love and kindness when seeing the cutest creatures in the world!

Newborn pandas with pink fur

Newborn Pandas

Newborn pandas under well taken

Newborn Pandas

Newborn pandas’ fur turn black and white gradually

Newborn Pandas

Newborn pandas getting fat

Newborn Pandas

Newborn pandas

Newborn Pandas

Newborn pandas living together

Newborn Pandas

Newborn pandas in Bifengxia Panda Base

Newborn Pandas

Newborn pandas in Ya’an Bifengxia Panda Base

Newborn Pandas