panda

The lesser, or red, panda lives in the bamboo forests of Nepal, West Myanmar, and South West China. A quiet creature, it spends the day asleep, curled up on a branch with its head tucked into its chest and its tail over its head. It feeds on bamboo shoots, grass, roots, fruit, acorns, and the occasional bird's egg.

The red panda is surprisingly agile in climbing trees and scuttling over rocks on its native mountains in China. Like many other members of the raccoon family (Procyonidae), its diet is mainly fruit, berries, and soft shoots, but it also eats the occasional small animal.

A giant panda in a reserve in China. Female giant pandas are sexually receptive for mating only three days in every year, and are fastidious about the males they will accept as mates. It is possible that the current population of pandas is therefore already too small to avoid extinction.

A bamboo forest near Huangshan, in Anhui division, China. Bamboo forests like this once supported significant numbers of pandas in western China.

One of two carnivores of different families, native to northwestern China and Tibet. The giant panda Ailuropoda melanoleuca has black-and-white fur with black eye patches and feeds mainly on bamboo shoots, consuming about 8 kg/17.5 lb of bamboo per day. It can grow up to 1.5 m/4.5 ft long, and weigh up to 140 kg/300 lb. It is an endangered species. In 2000 there were only 1,000 remaining in the wild, and a further 120 in zoos.

The lesser, or red, panda Ailurus fulgens, of the raccoon family, is about 50 cm/1.5 ft long, and is black and chestnut, with a long tail.

Pandas' bamboo diet is of low nutritional value, being about 90% water. This makes it impossible for them to hibernate, since although they spend about 12 hours of every day eating, they cannot accumulate the necessary reserves of fat. There is some dispute about whether they should be included in the bear family or the raccoon family, or classified as a family of their own.

Destruction of the giant pandas' natural habitats threatens to make them extinct in the wild, and they are the focus of conservation efforts. In July 1998 China's national Academy of Sciences announced a project to clone the panda by 2003. They plan to transfer the nucleus of a panda cell into that of another bear species, with the same species being used as a surrogate mother. In 1999 Chinese scientists succeeded in cloning hybrid embryos using the nucleus from a panda cell transferred into a rabbit ovum. The scientists will now attempt to implant an embryo into another bear species, probably a black bear.