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Giant panda eating bamboo

Giant panda

The giant panda is a rare, endangered and elusive bear, making the videos below of a newborn baby giant panda and the remarkable courtship scene filmed in the wild unique. Giant pandas are famous for their love of bamboo, a diet so nutritionally poor that the pandas have to consume up to 20kg each day. The extra digit on the panda's hand helps them to tear the bamboo and their gut is covered with a thick layer of mucus to protect against splinters. Habitat loss is the greatest cause of the giant panda's decline, and today their range is restricted to six separate mountain ranges in western China.

Did you know?
A giant panda is born pink, hairless, blind and 1/900th the size of its mother.

Scientific name: Ailuropoda melanoleuca

Rank: Species

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Distribution

Map showing the distribution of the Giant panda taxa

Species range provided by WWF's Wildfinder.

The Giant panda can be found in a number of locations including: Asia, China, Himalayas. Find out more about these places and what else lives there.

Habitats

The following habitats are found across the Giant panda distribution range. Find out more about these environments, what it takes to live there and what else inhabits them.

Broadleaf forest Broadleaf forest
Broadleaf forests are the dominant habitat of the UK and most of temperate northern Europe. There's little left of Britain's ancient wildwood, but isolated pockets of oak, beech and mixed deciduous and evergreen woodlands are scattered across the continent, and dictate its biodiversity.

Behaviours

Discover what these behaviours are and how different plants and animals use them.

Additional data source: Animal Diversity Web

Conservation Status

Endangered

  1. EX - Extinct
  2. EW
  3. CR - Threatened
  4. EN - Threatened
  5. VU - Threatened
  6. NT
  7. LC - Least concern

Population trend: Decreasing

Year assessed: 2008

Classified by: IUCN 3.1

Classification

  1. Life
  2. Animals
  3. Vertebrates
  4. Mammals
  5. Carnivora
  6. Bears
  7. Ailuropoda
  8. Giant panda

Video collections

Take a trip through the natural world with our themed collections of video clips from the natural history archive.

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    Narrated by Sir David Attenborough Planet Earth was the ground-breaking series that explored the wild and beautiful parts of our planet like never before.

  • Baby Animals Baby Animals

    With Ooh's and Ahh's galore this video clip collection celebrates a world of adorable animal babies.

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