The Giant Panda: could become creationists best argument against evolution

That light and flavorful first taste of Chengdu was followed by a taste less light but flavorful to the extreme: Sichuan cuisine. Throughout China and even beyond its borders, Sichuan is known for its especially spicy food. For a lover of the spicy food like me, Sichuan is a culinary paradise. For a person who can’t handle a speck of spice, like my friend Sarah, Sichuan food is like the fiery pits of hell manifest on earth and concentrated into a the contents of a single plate. Alas, sorry Sarah! It’s hard for me to imagine not being able to enjoy the spices of life. After enjoying the subtle tastes of subtle teas at the temple, our group piled back onto our bus and soon arrived at an authentic Sichuan restaurant. There, as plate after plate saturated with the spice and filled with chilies was placed upon the lazy Susan at the center of our table until it (and our stomachs) could hold no more, we took the level of our taste-testing intensity up a good several notches. All varieties of vegetable and meat, prepared with no lack of flavor and plenty of peppers. That meal, to me, was paradise on a collection of plates.

Sichuan is not only a paradise for fans of fiery food, but also a paradise for panda lovers: 80% of the world’s panda population calls Sichuan home. Though the recent Sichuan earthquake made our group’s original plans to visit the Wolong Nature Reserve (a protected panda habitat) impossible, no visit to Chengdu is complete without a Giant Panda sighting, so we paid a visit to the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding and Research Center on the outskirts of the city. One of Chengdu’s main attractions, the center attracts visitors and researchers alike from all over the world. After all, as their website says, “The giant panda is beloved by people from all over the world. All local and foreign visitors enjoy the beauty of giant pandas.” Yeah, the panda propaganda doesn’t lie: I too could not resist the charms of the pandas. They are just too ridiculously cute. Though the efforts expended by the researchers and personnel at this center at times may seem a little over the top—after my visit there, I’m convinced that no single species in the whole world has more people working or money spent on behalf of promoting their survival—just one look at a panda’s adorable face and it all seems worthwhile.

The mission of the research center we visited is to increase the amount and viability of the dwindling panda population with the hope of eventually finding a way of releasing animals bred in captivity into the wild. As a step towards that goal, the habitats housing the pandas in this huge facility are designed to make the pandas feel at home in captivity, each enclosure supposedly mimicking the Giant Panda’s natural environment as closely as possible (right down to the wooden jungle gym-like structures that took up most of the enclosures, apparently, as well as the bountiful bundles of bamboo that are plopped in front of the pandas at every schedule feeding time).

While strategically located a mere 10 km. away from Chengdu’s city center in order to provide a place where tourists can view China’s famous Giant Panda at their convenience, the center isn’t exactly strategically located in terms of caring for the pandas that live there: as approximately 99% of the Giant Pandas’ diet is comprised of bamboo—not just any ordinary bamboo but a few certain species of bamboo that only grows above a certain elevation in the mountainous regions of Sichuan and the surrounding areas. The slight catch is that the center itself is located below that elevation in an area where the bamboo pandas eat just doesn’t grow. So every day, personnel from the center collect the bamboo fresh from a higher elevation area and transport it down into the valley to feed to the center’s pandas by the truckload. Due to the low nutritional value of bamboo and the large size of the panda, it takes quite a bundle of bamboo to keep the panda up and running: the panda spends the bulk of its waking hours (11-14 hours a day) eating. The average panda eats an average of 25-40 pounds of bamboo per day. But the Giant Panda wasn’t always a vegetarian, apparently. The panda, like other bears, has the digestive system of a carnivore. At some point along the process of evolution, however, the panda switched to a vegetarian diet (I can’t say I blame them!).

Considering that the Giant Panda’s diet is so limited—almost exclusively restricted to one type of plant with a very limited growing range—its easier to understand why the panda as a species is dangerously close to extinction: any threat to their fragile environment is a threat to the pandas that live there. Under the pressures of human development that continued relatively unchecked for years, the panda population has dwindled to a mere estimated 1590 plus 250 in captivity. Its not just humans that can pose a threat to the Giant Panda’s fragile environment: natural disasters, like the recent devastating Sichuan earthquake, can also put the panda’s home in peril: according to some reports, roughly 80% of the panda’s habitat suffered some degree of damage from the quake. A number of pandas died in the aftermath, subtracting further from their already low number. The harsh realities of an at-risk environment holds true even for pandas in captivity: after the May 12 quake, the Chengdu Research Center’s pandas were forced to ho on a diet, as the environmental damage wrought by the disaster caused a food shortage for pandas wild and pampered alike.

But a dwindling natural habitat and food supply is just one of an array of reasons that the Giant Panda is on the endangered species list. A significant compounding factor is the panda’s stagnant rate of reproduction: the panda is an animal with a notoriously low libido. In an effort to get the sex-shy panda to mate, researchers have resorted to what news reports about this strange phenomenon have called “panda porn”: showing recordings of mating pandas to males that seem otherwise uninterested in sex to help them get “in the mood.” In combination with a number of “sexercises” (including one that involves dangling an apple above a panda to encourage it to stand on its hind legs and thus workout muscles key to sex but otherwise seldom used muscles that are nonetheless key to reproduction), the technique is supposedly working: after implementing Operation Panda Porn at the Chengdu Research Center in 2006, the number of newborns jumped up to 31 cubs from a mere 9 the previous year.

Still, combined with the fact that practically every trait the Giant Panda possesses just seems so against the laws of evolutionary theory—the panda’s clumsy cuteness, bizarrely designed body, habits tailored to a small and shrinking habitat, strictly limited diet, seeming reluctance to reproduce, the helplessness of its offspring upon birth (a baby panda comes out of the oven at 1/900th’s the size of its mother!), and I’m sure there are more traits that would fit the bill, too—it seems that the panda as a species has a death wish. Despite the fact that they have more government support and a larger team of scientists and researchers working on their behalf than any other animal I know of, the panda still doesn’t seem very interested in cooperating in the fight for its survival.

So why is the scientific community, the Chinese government, and the world at large coming together to help this admittedly pretty pathetic creature we know as the Giant Panda? My answer: because it’s so darn cute! Watching the pandas play and eat and snooze in their enclosure at the center made me a convert to their cause. With a higher cuteness factor than any other animal I’ve ever laid my eyes on, even though they seemed pretty clumsy and lazy and slouched as they sat and scarfed down their bamboo, the panda is irresistibly cute. That seems to be the only evolutionary factor working in its favor.