Panda babies in Wakayama

Cute though they are, I am always reminded of a conversation I had over a few beers with a zoologist some years ago: Mankind’s efforts to “save the panda” are probably just postponing a historical inevitability. The panda is an animal that, while omnivorous by design, is so attached to hard-to-digest bamboo that it eats it almost to the exclusion of a lot of other sources of food in its environment. If the bamboo disappears, so does the panda. It could survive quite well by just switching to something else, but it won’t.

They also don’t seem to like to mate, have a very low chance of successful impregnation if they do, and if after somehow successfully mating the female does give birth, she is very likely to be a lousy mother. Infant mortality among wild pandas is apparently incredibly high for a large mammal, perhaps in part because pandas often give birth to twins but the mother will only care for one, leaving one to die or not infrequently both to die as the mother can’t decide which squealing pink mass of flesh to pay attention to. This is why in the conservation centers human intervention is as obvious as it is – without humans stepping in all the time the panda population would probably never noticeably increase.

Destruction of the wild pandas’ environment has made them endangered faster, but it probably has not made them endangered “period”. That the panda has survived as long as it has is more a testament to the fact that there isn’t any other animal in that environment more effectively eating bamboo than it is a testament to the fact that the panda has successfully evolved to fill its niche. It is an evolutionary dead-end, the kind that fills the fossil record.

But it is a cute little failure….