Pandas are not particularly good at digesting bamboo, say scientists
A study of panda droppings and gut bacteria reveals that, pandas are not particularly good at digesting bamboo, their primary food source.
A giant panda opens its mouth as it leans on wood logs at a zoo in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, in January 2015.
Stringer/Reuters/File
Even though bamboo is their main food source, giant pandas are horrible at digesting it, a new study of their gut bacteria finds.
A look at the giant-panda聽听(bacteria living in the stomach and intestines) showed that the animals have relatively few bacteria that help digest fibrous plants such as bamboo. Instead, most of the panda's gut is covered with bacteria such as聽Escherichia/Shigella听补苍诲听Streptococcus,听organisms typically found in meat eaters, the researchers said.
These bacteria may be leftovers from an ancestor, the researchers said. The聽听(Ailuropoda melanoleuca) evolved from bears that ate both plants and meat. Ancient giant pandas likely began eating bamboo about 7 million years ago but became exclusive bamboo eaters about 2 million years ago, the researchers noted. []
Yet modern pandas spend about 14 hours a day eating bamboo, and it isn't an easy food for them to digest. Over time, the giant panda developed a powerful jaw and teeth to help it chew the fibrous plant. It also developed enlarged pseudothumbs (a wrist bone that acts like a thumb) to help it grasp bamboo stems, the researchers wrote in the study. But the animal's gut still looks like that of a carnivore, and it can digest only about 17 percent of the bamboo it eats, the researchers said.
"Unlike other plant-eating animals that have successfully evolved anatomically specialized聽to efficiently deconstruct fibrous plant matter, the giant panda still retains a gastrointestinal tract typical of carnivores," Zhihe Zhang, the study's lead author and director of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China, said in a statement.
"The animals also do not have the genes for plant-digesting enzymes in their own genome," Zhang said. "This combined scenario may have increased their risk for extinction."
In the study, researchers did a genetic analysis of the gut bacteria in the poop of 45 healthy pandas living at the Chengdu Research Base. After about one year, they collected 112 fecal samples from聽, juveniles and adults. Except for the cubs, which drank milk, each panda ate about 22 lbs. (10 kilograms) of bamboo and bamboo shoots, as well as up to 1.7 lbs. (800 grams) of steamed bread every day.
But the feces were full of undigested bamboo fragments, the researchers found.
"This result is unexpected and quite interesting, because it implies the giant panda's gut microbiota may not have well adapted to its unique diet, and places pandas at an evolutionary dilemma," said study co-author Xiaoyan Pang, an associate professor in the School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
All of the giant pandas, including nine captive and seven wild pandas previously studied, had a low diversity of聽. Moreover, the animal's microbiome didn't contain plant-degrading bacteria, such as聽Ruminococcaceae听补苍诲听Bacteroides,听which are widespread in other herbivorous animals.聽
However, the microbes in their gut did vary by season. For instance, the bacteria are different in the late autumn, when there are no young bamboo shoots, compared to in the spring and summer, Pang said.聽
The researchers plan to do follow-up work so they can learn more about the panda's gut bacteria, and how the microbes affect the animals' health and nutrition, the researchers said.
The findings were published online today (May 19) in the journal mBio, a publication from the American Society for Microbiology.
Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter聽. Follow Live Science聽,听听&补尘辫;听. Original article on聽.
Copyright 2015聽, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.