Giant pandas eat bamboo, and almost nothing else. WWF puts bamboo at about 99% of the diet, with the occasional egg or small animal making up the rest. A panda spends 10 to 16 hours a day feeding, which is most of its waking life.
The quantity is the part people find hard to believe, and the published figures vary a lot depending on which part of the plant is being counted.
How much bamboo does a panda eat a day? #
WWF says a giant panda “can eat up to 18kg of bamboo roots, stems, shoots and leaves per day”, which is about 40 pounds. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo gives a higher range, “from 70 to 100 pounds of bamboo each day” (roughly 32 to 45 kg).
Both are correct, because they’re measuring different meals. Fresh bamboo shoots are mostly water and weigh far more per unit of nutrition than dry leaves and woody stems, so a panda working through shoots eats a much heavier mass than one stripping leaves. The figure also varies by season, by what’s growing nearby, and by the size of the animal. Males can weigh up to 250 pounds (113 kg) in the wild, while females rarely reach 220 pounds (104 kg).
The safest way to state it: somewhere between 20 and 100 pounds a day, depending on what’s on the menu.
Why a panda has to eat that much #
A giant panda is a bear, in the family Ursidae, and it kept the digestive system that goes with that. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo puts it plainly: a panda’s “digestive system is more similar to that of a carnivore than an herbivore”, and much of what it eats “is passed as waste.”
A cow or a deer has a gut built to break down plant fibre, with the chambers and gut bacteria to do it slowly and thoroughly. A panda has a short, simple carnivore’s gut pushing enormous volumes of fibrous plant material through quickly and extracting comparatively little. The animal compensates by eating for most of the day and moving as little as possible. It also defecates up to 40 times a day.
That constraint explains a lot of panda behaviour that otherwise looks like laziness. Sitting still while eating is the energy budget working as intended.
The thumb that isn’t a thumb #
Pandas hold bamboo stalks in a way no other bear can, using what the Smithsonian describes as a “pseudo thumb, formed by an elongated and enlarged wrist bone covered with a fleshy pad of skin.” It’s a modified sesamoid bone rather than a real digit, and it works against the paw like a thumb against fingers.
The evolutionary reason is that the panda’s actual first digit isn’t opposable and lines up with the rest of its toes, so gripping a stalk the ordinary way isn’t possible. Red pandas have a false thumb too, arrived at separately, which is one of the stranger coincidences in mammal anatomy.
What’s in the other 1% #
Wild pandas occasionally eat eggs or small animals, according to WWF. Reports of pandas taking carrion or small rodents turn up periodically, and they remain carnivores by ancestry and equipment. But these are incidental additions, not a meaningful part of the diet. A panda that stopped eating bamboo would starve.
What red pandas eat #
Red pandas are not closely related to giant pandas (they’re the only living member of the family Ailuridae), but they converged on the same food. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo says “bamboo constitutes about 95% of the red panda’s diet”, and they also eat fruits and blossoms.
The difference is selectivity. Red pandas are much smaller, between 8 and 17 pounds (3.6 to 7.7 kg), and they pick the most nutritious parts of the plant rather than working through whole stalks the way a giant panda does. We compare the two species in giant panda vs red panda.
The bamboo problem #
A diet made of one plant is a conservation problem waiting to happen. Bamboo grows in the mountain forests of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces in China, and when a road, a dam or a plantation cuts through a valley, it doesn’t just remove habitat. It separates one group of pandas from the bamboo and the pandas on the other side.
WWF describes the wild population as divided into 33 isolated sub-populations, and lists climate change as a growing threat because bamboo belts are shifting to higher elevations that the mountains may not have. We cover the current status in are giant pandas still endangered.
If you like pandas but prefer yours in a form that involves no conservation anxiety, Merge Panda is a free drop-and-merge puzzle where you stack snacks in a bamboo crate and merge them upward: sprouts, berries, dango, rice balls, bao buns, peaches, watermelons and finally bamboo, which turns into a Panda Cub. It’s a game rather than a nature app, but the ladder does end with an Emperor Panda wearing a crown.
Frequently asked questions #
How much bamboo does a giant panda eat per day? #
Estimates range from about 18 kg (40 lb) per WWF to 70 to 100 lb (32 to 45 kg) per the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. The gap comes from which parts of the plant are counted: water-heavy fresh shoots weigh much more than dry leaves for the same nutrition.
Do pandas eat meat? #
Rarely, and only opportunistically. WWF notes that pandas occasionally eat eggs or small animals. They’re classified as carnivores by ancestry and still have a carnivore’s digestive tract, but around 99% of what they eat is bamboo.
Why do pandas eat bamboo if they’re bears? #
Because it’s abundant, it’s available year-round, and almost nothing else competes for it. The trade-off is that a bear’s gut extracts little from it, so a panda has to eat for 10 to 16 hours a day and conserve energy the rest of the time.
What part of the bamboo do pandas eat? #
Roots, stems, shoots and leaves, according to WWF. Shoots are the most nutritious and the easiest to digest, which is why the total weight eaten in a day changes so much depending on what’s available.
What do pandas eat besides bamboo in zoos? #
Zoos supply bamboo as the bulk of the diet, since nothing else meets the animal’s needs, and supplement it with prepared foods. Any specific zoo diet is set by that institution’s keepers and nutritionists, so the Smithsonian’s National Zoo or your local zoo’s own panda page is the place to check.
How big is a newborn panda if the mother eats that much? #
Tiny. A newborn weighs 3 to 5 ounces, about the size of a stick of butter, and is roughly 1/900th the size of its mother. We go into that in how big is a baby panda.