Red Pandas are Picky Eaters and Home-choosers: Why Bamboo is More Important than We Thought
By Maria Manuel
We all know the red panda as the panda’s adorable bamboo-loving and always-sleeping cousin, and honestly, that part’s true.
This little guy is found throughout mountains in Asia, preferring colder habitats with lots of bamboo to eat and sleep in. However, one would wonder: how important is bamboo anyway? How much bamboo do they need considering their small size, and can they survive off other plants?
An article by Dr. Bista and other scientists surveyed the Himalayans to find what red pandas look for when looking for a home, and the results show that red panda conservation is a topic that needs special consideration.
What’s the Big Deal?
Sure, red pandas are cute and cuddly, but what’s there to them that makes scientists want to study them? What’s so important that made researchers travel hundreds of kilometers to gather more information about their living habits?
The first thing is that red pandas are endangered, meaning that there’s not many of them left. And after learning about them, it won’t be hard guessing why.
Red pandas are habitat specialists, only living in very specific places found on earth. These guys are only found in cold, high elevation bamboo forests in the Himalayas, a habitat that continues to decline as deforestation continues and global temperatures steadily rise. This makes conserving those places much more important, making every inch of bamboo forest count to make sure red pandas don’t die off in the wild.
So, if that’s the case, why don’t people put their energy into just conserving everything?
In a conservationist’s ideal world, these forests would be 100% protected. However, scientists have limited funds, so they have to know the exact areas they should focus on to produce the best results.
For instance, is the size of bamboo more important, or the amount of individual ones? And how important is temperature in comparison to plant diversity?
This predicament makes the data found by Dr. Bista much more important to conserving the red pandas.
The Study: Goals and Methods
According to Dr. Bista and their colleagues, they trekked across the Himalayan forests to assess the importance of each habitat variable to red panda populations. They gathered data on the different temperatures, bamboo density, and plant diversity using other research articles and field tools in different areas of Nepal’s Himalayan mountains. Then, they matched their findings with how much red pandas were found in that area.
As for finding how many red pandas were in an area, the scientists looked for signs of a red panda, from direct sightings, footprints, or scratch marks that resembled that of a red panda.
The Study: Results
Factors such as temperature, tree height, tree density, and water availability varied in importance across different areas. While red pandas seemed to follow a pattern, such as preferring short trees, its influence wasn’t consistent across the different areas. In other words, while there was a correlation between these factors and red panda abundance, it was not consistent across different test sites.
However, the one factor that did remain consistent across the different sites was bamboo availability and density. The results indicated that more red pandas or signs of red panda presence were found in areas that had more bamboo shoots and a higher bamboo density.
So, What Does This Mean for Conservation?
It is clear that plant diversity in terms of species and bamboo size is important for conserving red pandas. They still need access to water, different canopy densities for habitat variation, and colder temperatures up in the mountains.
However, bamboo availability is the consistent, and likely the most important, factor that influenced red panda abundance.
Red pandas seemed to prefer areas with more bamboo since it provides them food. They eat almost exclusively bamboo leaves, so no bamboo means no food, which doesn’t sound good for the little critters. Bamboo also provides them a way to escape predators, like snow leopards. Its thin trunks let small animals climb to the top, yet remains too fragile for bigger animals to follow.
It is no wonder red pandas choose bamboo presence over everything else — its presence lets them avoid starvation and predators, helping them survive in the Himalayan mountains.
This means that conservation efforts should be focused on saving bamboo trees.
While it may sound similar to the “just conserve the forest” solution, one we previously mentioned would be difficult due to limited resources, these findings are still important to helping conservation in two ways:
1.) Knowing which plants to keep and which plants to give.
2.) Providing evidence to support the argument that bamboo is important to red panda conservation, helping fight against deforestation in the Himalayan mountains.
Final Thoughts
Red pandas are only found in the Himalayan mountain range in Asia. To make things worse, they rely on bamboo as their main food source. This makes them very vulnerable to deforestation, but one way we can keep these charismatic creatures is by protecting the bamboo forests they call home.
Bamboo is not only their main food source, but a plant that provides them protection from predation and the cold. It is the one-stop plant for all red panda needs, making it an invaluable asset for saving red panda populations.
Citations
Bista, Damber, et al. “Red Panda Fine‐Scale Habitat Selection along a Central Himalayan Longitudinal Gradient.” Ecology and Evolution, vol. 9, no. 9, May 2019, pp. 5260–5269., doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5116.
