EALING: Unless those lovable, cute giant pandas do something about their bamboo-only diet, they will have something more dire to worry about than their waistlines.
Pandas apparently descended from omnivorous bears, but their anatomy has not evolved much over millions of years. As a result, pandas’ digestive systems are not equipped to break down vegetation even though they have been subsisting almost entirely on bamboo since about two million years ago, according to a team of scientists from China.
“We found that the giant panda gut microbiota is low in diversity and highly variable across seasons. It also shows an overall composition typical of bears and entirely differentiated from other herbivores, with low levels of putative cellulose-digesting bacteria,” according to a study published on mBio, an open-access journal published by the American Society for Microbiology.
What this means is that pandas are able to digest only a small portion of bamboo that they consume and why they often have to spend up to 14 hours a day, eating as much as 28 pounds of bamboo.
It also highlights the ongoing battle pandas fight not only with Mother Nature and mankind but their own inability to evolve and adapt.
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