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Giant Panda

Ailuropoda melanoleuca · easy

The giant panda is a bear that has committed almost entirely to eating a grass. Bamboo is poor food: low in nutrients, tough, and seasonally unreliable. A panda compensates by eating enormous quantities of it, up to fourteen hours a day, and by doing as little else as possible. It retains a carnivore's short digestive tract, which is badly suited to plant matter, so most of what it eats passes through barely used.

The famous thumb is not a thumb. It is an enlarged wrist bone, extended into a pad the panda opposes against its palm to grip a stem — an improvised solution that evolved separately from the primate hand doing the same job.

Wild pandas survive in fragmented mountain forest in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, at altitudes where bamboo grows in dense stands beneath a conifer canopy. Their decline was driven less by hunting than by the conversion of valley forest to farmland, which cut the remaining populations into isolated pockets.

The recovery effort has become one of conservation's better-known successes: sustained habitat protection and corridor building lifted the species from Endangered to Vulnerable, though the underlying population remains small and dependent on continued management.

Where it lives

Worml lists the giant panda as native to China. Its habitat is temperate montane bamboo forest.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Giant Panda is rated easy. To solve the round you need to name the single country it lives in. How scoring works →

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