Giant pandas eat the tender stems, buds and bamboo shoots of bamboo.
The main food of pandas is sword bamboo, which is lush and green all year round and has roughly the same nutritional content. Pandas only eat bamboo hearts and bamboo shoots, and sometimes bamboo leaves. Pandas have very short intestines and no bacteria to ferment cellulose. Pandas can only absorb 17% of the bamboo they eat, and they spend more than 10 hours eating every day.
Giant pandas are carnivores, but 99% of their food consists of more than 20 kinds of bamboo plants growing in mountains and deep valleys. As the seasons change, the bamboo species and parts of bamboo eaten in the diet of giant pandas also vary. The favorites are bamboo shoots. From spring to summer, they like several kinds of bamboos of the genus Qiong bamboo and Asparagus genus, as well as Bashan wood bamboo and walking stick bamboo. It feeds on the bamboo shoots of Bamboo spp.
Bamboo shoots are new bamboo plants that grow from the underground stems of bamboo without branches and leaves. Their tissues are young and tender, with high water content. The nutritional content of bamboo shoots is 1.27% crude fat, 33.62% crude fiber, and crude protein. 10.32%, total sugar content 26.15%. Bamboo shoots are tender and juicy, good in palatability, easy to digest and absorb, and are a delicacy for giant pandas. Every year from spring to autumn, in order to eat bamboo shoots of different species at different altitudes, giant pandas migrate from the middle mountains to the high mountains. This is called "shooting".
Behavioral Characteristics of Pandas
Giant pandas spend half of their time eating every day, and most of the remaining half of their time is spent in sleep. In the wild, giant pandas sleep for 2-4 hours between every two meals. Lying flat, on their sides, prone, stretched out or curled up are their preferred sleeping methods.
In the zoo, keepers feed them regularly twice a day, so the giant pandas spend the rest of their time resting. Giant pandas look cute even when sleeping. They are very flexible and can put their bulky bodies into a variety of positions. My favorite position is to put my legs up on a tree and cover my eyes with my hands.
The most adorable features of the giant panda are its chubby body and its slow, piggy-back way of walking. This is because they live in an environment where there is plenty of food and no natural predators, so there is no need to move quickly. But it's this slow movement that allows it to conserve energy and adapt to low-energy foods. They sometimes climb trees to scout out situations, escape intruders, or take a nap.