The Giant Panda, Flower and Garden Style

These adorable giant pandas are from one of Epcot's flower and garden shows. They are posing outside the China Pavilion. As you can see, the giant panda has an insatiable appetite for bamboo. The typical panda spends half the day eating, that's 12 out of every 24 hours. Hmm, I wish I could do that. It takes about 30 pounds of bamboo to satisfy a giant panda's daily dietary needs. They supplement their diets with other less appetizing items as well, like rodents and birds.

Wild pandas only live in remote, mountainous regions in central China. These bamboo forests are cool and wet, exactly like the pandas prefer it. There are fewer than 1,000 giant pandas left in the wild and around 100 pandas live in zoos. Much of what we know about pandas comes from study of these zoo animals, because their wild cousins are so rare and elusive. (Thank you to nationalgeographic.com for much of this info.)