Something fun for your weekend reading pleasure, a
Wall Street Journal article (behind the paywall but readable
here) about giant pandas. It turns out much of what we've been taught about pandas is wrong! First the myth:
The panda is often considered a joke of a bear. “Pandas are bad at sex and picky about food,” jeered the Economist in 2014. “These genetic misfits might have died out long ago, had they not been so adorable.” Without our help, so the narrative goes, pandas surely would have joined the dinosaurs and the dodo on evolution’s scrap heap.
Then the reality:
The panda is, in fact, a splendid survivor. It has been around for some 18 million years (three times longer than we hominins) and is perfectly adapted to its admittedly eccentric lifestyle.
The real panda is a secret stud, with a taste for flesh and a fearsome bite, at least in its natural habitat. But that habitat is withering thanks to human encroachment.
We like to think of pandas as the hippie vegetarians of the ursine kingdom. But like most bears, they are opportunistic omnivores. The panda dines almost exclusively on bamboo, but it hasn’t lost its taste for flesh. (snip) I’ve seen footage of a wild panda chowing down on a dead deer.
And about their supposed weak-to-nonexistent sex drive:
In the days before genetic testing, sexing pandas proved to be a notoriously difficult art, since the panda penis is virtually indistinguishable from female genitalia.
Many supposed "mating pairs" in zoos have inadvertently been same-sex with of course no results. The article's description of panda sex in the wild is a hoot.
