Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca): Facts and Diet

What does a giant panda look like?

The giant panda has the stocky body of a bear, a large round head and a short tail. Its coat is mostly white, with black ears, black eye patches, black legs and a black band that runs over the shoulders. The fur is thick and woolly, which keeps the animal warm and dry in cold, misty forests. Scientists think the bold pattern helps pandas hide in both snowy and shady places and helps them signal to each other; see why are pandas black and white?

The round face comes from huge jaw muscles attached to a high crest on the skull, and the cheek teeth are broad and flat for crushing tough stems. A panda’s bite is among the strongest of any bear for its size.

Each front paw has five clawed fingers plus a sixth “pseudo-thumb”, an enlarged wrist bone (the radial sesamoid) covered by a fleshy pad. It works against the fingers like a thumb, letting the panda grip bamboo stalks firmly while it strips and eats them.

In the Qinling Mountains of Shaanxi a few pandas are brown and white instead of black and white. These rare animals belong to the Qinling subspecies, A. m. qinlingensis.

How big are giant pandas?

Giant pandas are medium-sized bears. Males are usually about 10–20% heavier than females.

That last figure is remarkable. A newborn panda is roughly 1/800 to 1/1,000 of its mother’s weight, one of the smallest newborns relative to the mother of any placental mammal. Learn more in how big is a baby panda?

Habitat and range

Giant pandas live only in China, in six isolated mountain ranges on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau: the Qinling, Minshan, Qionglai, Daxiangling, Xiaoxiangling and Liangshan mountains. Most wild pandas live in Sichuan province, with smaller numbers in southern Shaanxi and southern Gansu.

Their habitat is cool, damp broadleaf, mixed and conifer forest with a thick understory of bamboo, mostly at about 1,500–3,000 m (5,000–10,000 ft). Pandas favor gentle slopes and old-growth forest, which offers dense bamboo and hollow trees for shelter. Thousands of years ago pandas ranged across much of southern and eastern China and into northern Myanmar and Vietnam, but farming and settlement pushed them into the mountains.

Panda forests are shared with many other rare animals, including the red panda, the takin (a large goat-antelope that also eats bamboo), the golden snub-nosed monkey, the golden pheasant and the snow leopard on higher ground. Because protecting panda habitat also protects these neighbors, conservationists call the giant panda an umbrella species. Red and giant pandas often live on the same mountains but tend to use different slopes, heights and bamboo parts, so they rarely compete directly. The wild population is split into about 33 separate groups, many of them very small, cut off from each other by valleys, roads and farmland.

What do giant pandas eat?

Bamboo makes up about 99% of a giant panda’s diet. Pandas eat the shoots, leaves and stems of about two dozen bamboo species and switch between plant parts through the year, favoring protein-rich new shoots in spring and early summer and leaves later in the year.

Bamboo is poor food for a bear. The panda still has the short, simple gut of a carnivore and digests only around a fifth of what it eats, so it must feed for about 10–16 hours a day and eat roughly 12–38 kg (26–84 lb) of bamboo daily. It saves energy by moving slowly, resting often and keeping social contact to a minimum.

Very occasionally pandas eat small mammals such as pikas or rodents, birds’ eggs or carrion. The full story, including how pandas cope with cyanide in bamboo, is in what do pandas eat?

Behavior

Adult giant pandas live alone. Each one uses a home range that is often around 4–6 km² (1.5–2.3 sq mi), and females in particular avoid each other’s core areas. Pandas can be active at almost any hour, with peaks in the early morning, late afternoon and at night, because they need to eat so often.

Pandas communicate mostly by smell. They rub scent from a gland under the tail onto trees and rocks, sometimes doing a handstand to place the mark higher, and spray urine. Neighbors can tell from these marks the sex, age, size and breeding condition of the panda that left them. Pandas also bleat, honk, squeal, growl and bark during encounters.

Unlike many bears, giant pandas do not hibernate. Their bamboo diet cannot build up enough fat for a long winter fast. They climb trees well, especially as youngsters, and rest in hollow trunks or rock crevices.

Reproduction and life cycle

Females come into heat only once a year, in spring (usually March to May), and are fertile for just two or three days. Males find them by scent and calls, and several males may compete for one female.

Gestation lasts about 95–160 days because the fertilized egg can float freely before it implants in the womb. Cubs are born mostly in August and September in a tree hollow or rock den. Pink, blind and almost hairless, a newborn weighs only about 100 g (3.5 oz). Twins occur in roughly half of births, but in the wild a mother usually raises only one.

The cub’s eyes open at about six to eight weeks, it starts crawling at around three months and it begins eating bamboo at about six months. It stays with its mother for about 18–24 months. Females first breed at four to eight years old and usually give birth only every two years or so, which is one reason panda numbers recover slowly.

Lifespan, predators and threats

Wild giant pandas live about 15–20 years. In captivity many reach their late 20s or 30s, and the oldest known panda, Jia Jia of Ocean Park Hong Kong, died in 2016 at 38.

Healthy adults have few natural enemies. Cubs, however, can be killed by leopards, snow leopards, Asian black bears, yellow-throated martens, birds of prey and feral dogs. Parasitic roundworms are a common cause of death in wild pandas.

The main long-term threats come from people: forest clearing, roads, dams and settlements that split habitat into small, isolated patches, plus livestock grazing in panda forests. Many subpopulations are small, which raises the risk of inbreeding. Climate change is expected to shift or shrink the bamboo forests pandas depend on, and bamboo itself flowers and dies over large areas every few decades, which can leave pandas short of food.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List classifies the giant panda as Vulnerable with an increasing population trend. It was listed as Endangered for many years and was moved down to Vulnerable in 2016, after China’s fourth national survey (2011–2014) counted 1,864 wild pandas, about 17% more than a decade earlier. China itself reclassified the species as vulnerable in 2021.

Protection began with Wolong Nature Reserve in 1963. By the time of the fourth survey, 67 reserves protected about two-thirds of wild pandas, and the Giant Panda National Park, formally created in 2021, links many of them across about 27,000 km² (10,500 sq mi) of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. Logging bans in natural forests and bamboo corridors between populations have helped. The panda is also listed on CITES Appendix I, which bans international trade. For the full picture, see are giant pandas still endangered?

Pandas and people

The giant panda became known to Western science in 1869 through the French missionary Armand David. Today it is China’s best-known national symbol and the logo of WWF, which chose a panda in 1961. Since the 1980s, China has lent pandas to foreign zoos on long-term conservation loans instead of giving them away, and cubs born abroad belong to China.

Captive breeding, once very difficult, now succeeds regularly at centers such as Chengdu and Wolong, and several captive-bred pandas have been released into the wild since 2006. The captive population passed 750 animals in 2024.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the giant panda is related to the red panda and is not a real bear. Fact: DNA studies place the giant panda firmly in the bear family, while the red panda belongs to its own family, Ailuridae. See are pandas bears? and the red panda profile.
• Myth: pandas are strict vegetarians. Fact: they are carnivorans with a meat-eater’s gut that switched to bamboo, and they still eat meat on rare occasions.
• Myth: pandas are an evolutionary dead end that cannot breed. Fact: wild pandas breed normally; the slow reproduction is natural, and the past problems were mostly in captivity.