How many of us all over the world are averse to the adorable charms of the giant pandas. From their friendly approach toward human beings to the physical attractive, the giant panda has secured a warm place in the hearts of most people all across the planet; making them the popular face of many a conservation of animal movements such as the WWF.
The black patches over its eyes and all over the round body, makes up the panda to be one hard to resist species.
Unfortunately, all this love and adoration as well as the celebrity status has not yet been able to crave an entirely safe environ for this particular member of the bear family. It is encroaching on their dwelling space that it going on causing harm to their numbers and existence at large.
Evolution:
The evolution history of the giant panda collected from fossil suggests that the ancestor of the modern day giant panda is the Pygmy Giant Panda (Ailuropoda microta). However, it was smaller in stature, drawing up to a height of about 1m (3 ft.) in comparison to the modern day giant panda which grows up to about 1.5m (5ft). According to the earliest known discovery, the first skull that was discovered of the pygmy giant panda is approximately estimated to be 2 million years old. Research also indicates that the pandas have evolved over 3 million years as an absolute separate lineage than that of the bear family.
For many decades of panda study though, the precise taxonomic classification of the Giant Panda was under considerable debate as the animal was found to share characteristics of both the bears and the raccoons. Molecular studies of the species though have suggested that the giant panda shares actual relation to the bear family and part of the Ursidae family.
Natural Habitat:
Giant Pandas live mainly in bamboo forests high in the mountains of western China. Most of the wild population is distributed between the Qinling and Minshan Mountains. The giant panda was once widespread throughout southern and eastern China, as well as neighbouring Myanmar (Burma) and northern Vietnam.
The ever expanding human population his forced these lovable and territorial species to seek out other natural environs in order to survive. The species is presently barricaded to approximately 20% of the mountain patches in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu regions. The giant panda's natural habitat surrounds the great Sichuan Plain. To the north are the Qinling Mountains and to the west are the Minshan, Qionglai, Liangshan, Daxiangling, and Xiaoxiangling Mountains.
Minshan Mountains
The Minshan Mountains flank the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, the highest and biggest plateau in the world. These mountains form a natural barrier between the densely populated southern and eastern provinces of China and the great wilderness of the Tibetan Plateau to the west.
WWF has identified the Minshan Mountain range in Sichuan and Gansu provinces as a particularly important landscape for biodiversity: Its magnificent forests are home to a stunning array of wildlife besides the giant panda, such as dwarf blue sheep and beautiful multi-coloured pheasants.
There are around 720 pandas in the Minshan Mountains, 45% of the total wild population. PingWu county, in the Minshan Mountain area, has the highest density of pandas in the wild.
Qinling Mountains
The Qinling Mountains, in the Shaanxi Province, forms a natural barrier between northern and southern China and protects the south from the cold northern weather and warm rains on the southern slopes support a rich variety of plants and animals.
It is an important watershed for China as a drop of rain in the Qinling Mountains, could end up in one of country's two great rivers, the Yangtze or the Yellow.
There are around 200-300 hundred pandas in the Qinling Mountains, 20% of the total wild population. The region is also home to a number of other endangered species, including the golden monkey, takin and crested ibis.
Increasing protected areas
The provincial governments of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, working closely with WWF, have been creating new nature reserves and extending existing reserves.
[Sourcehttp://wwf.panda.org/]
Conservation
The Giant Panda is an endangered species, threatened by continued habitat loss and by a very low birthrate, both in the wild and in captivity.
The Giant Panda has been a target for poaching by locals since ancient times and by foreigners since it was introduced to the West. Starting in the 1930s, foreigners were unable to poach Giant Pandas in China because of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, but pandas remained a source of soft furs for the locals. The population boom in China after 1949 created stress on the pandas' habitat, and the subsequent famines led to the increased hunting of wildlife, including pandas. During the Cultural Revolution, all studies and conservation activities on the pandas were stopped. After the Chinese economic reform, demand for panda skins from Hong Kong and Japan led to illegal poaching for the black market, acts generally ignored by the local officials at the time.
Close up of a baby seven-month-old panda cub in the Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan, China.
Though the Wolong National Nature Reserve was set up by the PRC government in 1958 to save the declining panda population, few advances in the conservation of pandas were made, due to inexperience and insufficient knowledge of ecology. Many believed that the best way to save the pandas was to cage them. As a result, pandas were caged at any sign of decline, and suffered from terrible conditions. Because of pollution and destruction of their natural habitat, along with segregation due to caging, reproduction of wild pandas was severely limited. In the 1990s, however, several laws (including gun control and the removal of resident humans from the reserves) helped the chances of survival for pandas. With these renewed efforts and improved conservation methods, wild pandas have started to increase in numbers in some areas, even though they still are classified as a rare species.
In 2006, scientists reported that the number of pandas living in the wild may have been underestimated at about 1,000. Previous population surveys had used conventional methods to estimate the size of the wild panda population, but using a new method that analyzes DNA from panda droppings, scientists believe that the wild panda population may be as large as 3,000. Although the species is still endangered, it is thought that the conservation efforts are working. As of 2006, there were 40 panda reserves in China, compared to just 13 reserves two decades ago.[6]
The Giant Panda is among the world's most adored and protected rare animals, and is one of the few in the world whose natural inhabitant status was able to gain a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. The Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries, located in the southwest Sichuan province and covering seven natural reserves, were inscribed onto the World Heritage List in 2006.[38][39]
Not all conservationists agree that the money spent on conserving pandas is money well spent. Chris Packham has argued that breeding pandas in captivity is "pointless" because "there is not enough habitat left to sustain them".[40] Packham argues that the money spent on pandas would be better spent elsewhere,[40] and has said that he would "eat the last panda if I could have all the money we have spent on panda conservation put back on the table for me to do more sensible things with,"[41] though he has apologized for upsetting people who like pandas.[42] He points out that "The panda is possibly one of the grossest wastes of conservation money in the last half century." [Source wikipedia]
