Ailuropoda – Giant panda

The black and white beauty with an expressionless face pointed canines, and huge bearish body, these furballs are loved all over the globe.

Once common throughout southern China and as far north as Beijing and south into Southeast Asia, the Panda’s distribution is presently confined to six mountain ranges in Chinese provinces.

These Carnivora evolved to specialize in a diet of a particular grass—bamboo! Since bamboos are low in nutrition, they eat a lot daily and are highly frugal with their energy expenditure.

Habitat fragmentation and degradation confined Pandas to high elevations, resulting in small isolated subpopulations increasing vulnerability to extinction through loss of genetic diversity.