the.com/panda
a bear that quit eating meat to chew the world's worst diet professionally
means a large black-and-white bear native to the mountain forests of central China that subsists almost entirely on bamboo, or the unrelated raccoon-like red panda that shares the name.
from The name reached European languages in the 19th century from the Himalayan region, and the likeliest source is Nepali — possibly from a word for the red panda, the animal Westerners met first. The famous black-and-white giant panda borrowed the name afterward. The deeper root is murky; one charming guess ties it to a Nepali phrase meaning 'bamboo-eater,' but that's unconfirmed, so treat it as a plausible story rather than a fact.
- bad diet
- Carnivore gut digesting bamboo at brutal 17% efficiency
- eat forever
- Munches up to 38kg of bamboo daily
- fake thumb
- A wrist bone evolved to grip stalks
- tiny start
- Newborns weigh less than a stick of butter
- loner life
- Solitary except for a brief spring mating window
giant panda — endangered species native to central china, ~1,864 individuals in the wild as of 2014
fu bao — giant panda born at seoul zoo in 2020, returned to china in 2023