Panda is very fastidious in eating

If you think your baby is hard to eat, try raising a big panda. There must be four bamboo scavengers working all day at Atlanta Zoo, USA, to satisfy panda couple Lun Lun and Yang Yang. And they are not always satisfied.

The diet of these animals consists mainly of bamboo, but they only eat about 20 of the 200 species that grow in Georgia. The type of bamboo they like changes from time to time in the year. Sometimes they only eat exactly one species for the whole week, then refuse to eat that way anymore. And bamboo must always be fresh - they will turn away from old or wilted bamboos and their stems are discolored.

Therefore, the zoo must resort to a bamboo hunting team to harvest at the local garden. The bamboo they earned could not have pesticides or near polluted water. And most importantly, it must make the bears delicious.

Yang Yang, and his partner, always make bamboo sword workers busy every day.(Photo: gsu.edu)

Bamboo grows freely and as fast as weeds in many parts of the world. The Atlanta Zoo can completely grow this plant on its own, but this won't be practical when the panda's taste changes constantly.

"They can eat yellow bamboo from Mr. Smith's garden but don't eat it from Mrs. Jones' garden , " said Jan Fortune, director of the zoo's animal nutrition department.

These fastidious black and white animals originated in Sichuan Province, China. The female Lun Lun weighs about 113 kg. Male Yang Yang weighs 136 kg. Each child eats about 9-13 kg of bamboo a day. Leaves and stems account for 95% of their diet. Occasionally, they will be treated with soy cakes and apples.

That means bamboo hunters have to earn about 181 kg of bamboo each week to provide enough food for pandas and some other zoo animals such as elephants and gorillas.

The panda search team has to work 5 days a week to harvest bamboo from family or business gardens on the list of 1,500 donors within 160 km of Atlanta. Their work will be much heavier in the next 9 months when the panda Mei Lan, born on September 6, weaned her mother's milk and switched to eating plants.

The zoo spends $ 2 million per year exclusively for pandas, including the cost of renting bears from the Chinese government and hiring bamboo men. These bamboos must be free of chemicals, bird droppings or other animal waste. Bamboo grown near crowded streets is also not good because waste from vehicles can contaminate crops. And the bamboo hunting team could not use the machines because the oil or gas released could cause poisoning for the bears. Manual sawing and leaf trimming machines are oiled after being disinfected daily.

Other zoos in the US have to find bamboo for pandas in different ways. Memphis Zoo has a group of bamboo hunters in the area. They also planted this plant on a farm of 28,327 m ² . The San Diego Zoo grows all the bamboos that three adult animals specialize in. The Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington takes most of the bamboo from a private provider in Maryland, but they are still trying to grow some in their zoo.

Since this animal is extremely fastidious, most zoos realize that growing a single species of bamboo cannot meet the demand. The Atlanta Zoo has a record keeping the types of bamboo that pandas eat every day, but the animals often change their minds.

"We must always improvise. Fortunately, we have elephants, what pandas don't like, elephants like it," said Rytis Daujotas, one of the bamboo swordsmen at the Atlanta Zoo.

MT