We estimate that about a third of the traffic that lands on our site are actually looking for information about Pandas, and not the cool eco-friendly wooden eyewear kind.
We would find that discouraging, except that Giant Panda Bears (or Ailuropoda Melanoleuca) are actually really cool and when in Rome…
So, what do we know about Panda Bears? For a long time, these adorable black and white bears were facing extinction and extremely endangered. Thankfully, through the hard work of zoos and organizations like the WWF, as of 2016 the panda was officially upgraded from an endangered to vulnerable species! At the time of writing, there are roughly 2000 pandas living in the wild.
Pandas are native to the mixed bamboo forests of southwest China and tend to live mostly in the high western mountains. Famously, their diet consists almost entirely of bamboo. As a food source, bamboo is pretty terrible when it comes to things like vitamins, nutrients, and calories, so these bears have to consume between 26 to 84 pounds daily. That’s a lot of bamboo and explains why diminishing habitats are such a threat to these creatures. Pandas have extreme difficulty breeding in captivity which has added further complications to efforts to save the species. Newborn pandas are roughly the size of a stick of butter or 1/900th the size of their parents. As adults, they’ll reach somewhere between 220 and 300lb (that’s about 367 - 550 pairs of panda sunglasses by the way).
Fun fact: scientists aren’t actually sure why the panda bear developed its iconic black and white markings.
