Giant Pandas are the first of our new three patterns in the Endangered Asia collection. I chose these because of their quirky personality and distinct look, and in order to share their story a little and raise awareness.
Photo by Peter Burdon on Unsplash
Giant Pandas are classed as vulnerable, recently being moved from endangered status after a slight increase in their numbers, despite there only being less than 2,000 in the wild and a few hundred in captivity.
Adults can grow to around four feet in height, and are pretty much what you think of when I say Panda, black and white, large, and cute!
Their diet is an interesting one, they consist pretty much entirely on bamboo in their mountainous forest habitat. Bamboo actually has more than 500 different species, but there's only a few different ones in their habitat. The leaves and shoots make up their diet, and most of what they do during the day. They tend to be loners and females end up with territory. They do meet others during brief periods when they mate.
Pandas give birth to twins half of the time roughly, but due to limited milk production they tend to choose the stronger of the two and leave the other, to give the one the best chance of survival. In rare cases triplets have been seen too.
Their main threat is habitat loss, this is directly hurting the population due to the construction of dams, roads or other human-made features that have isolated populations from each other. This means inbreeding is more likely to happen, they are less likely to find new bamboo forests and disease could spread within a small area.
In China there are now more than 50 panda reserves, although a lot of them live outside of this, but conservation efforts in the past few decades have slowly increased some numbers and provided more safe areas for pandas to live and thrive.
If you're a fan of these gorgeous creatures, you may like the Giant Panda collection here, keep an eye out soon for how we'll help support conservation efforts here at Tahlia Paige too!
