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Red Panda

Ailurus fulgens · medium

The red panda is not a panda, not a raccoon, and not a bear. After being shuffled between families for well over a century it now sits alone in its own, Ailuridae, the last survivor of a group once spread across Eurasia and North America.

It does share one striking feature with the giant panda: an extended wrist bone working as a false thumb, used to grip bamboo stems. The two animals are only distantly related, so both arrived at the same solution independently — a much-cited example of convergent evolution.

Bamboo is a poor diet for a carnivore's digestive system, and the red panda's response is to spend as little energy as possible. It sleeps a great deal, moves slowly, and in cold weather curls up with its thick banded tail wrapped over itself as a blanket. In hard winters its metabolism drops rather than its activity rising.

It lives in temperate montane forest along the Himalaya and into southwestern China, where it needs both bamboo understorey and old trees with hollows to shelter in. Forest clearance has broken that habitat into patches, and the animal's low reproductive rate makes lost populations slow to return.

Where it lives

Worml lists the red panda as native to 5 countries — Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar and Nepal. Its habitat is temperate montane forest with bamboo understorey.

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

Red Panda is rated medium. To solve the round you need to find any 3 of its 5 listed countries. How scoring works →

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