Giant Panda

Giant Panda – the Fragile Earth

An illustration by Pia Ravenari of a Giant Panda facing the right in profile, with a slight smile on its face, against a green stylised background. It has a bamboo symbol on its cheek.

Keywords:

Fragility, the fragile earth, extinction, doing what you have to do, breaking away from your ancestry, breaking away from family, breaking the cycle, potential for autism, lateral thought and intelligence, vegetarianism.

General Description:

The giant panda, Endangered, is a large bamboo-eating mammal which, despite its mostly plant diet, belongs in the family of carnivores.
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Because the panda has the digestive system of a carnivore, it actually yields very little nutrition or nourishment from bamboo at all and because of this, newborn pandas only weight 1/900th of the mother. If the mother panda has more than one cub, she will abandon one to die; she can only raise one.

Not exactly the most adaptive of animals! But beautiful none-the-less.