Card #025 · Mammals
Red panda
Ailurus fulgens
Super Rare EN · Endangered
Field notes
- Classification
- Order Carnivora · Family Ailuridae
- Range
- Eastern Himalayas and southwest China
- Size
- 51–63 cm (20–25 in) body
- Weight
- 3–15 kg (7–33 lb)
- Lifespan
- ~14 yrs (captive)
- Diet
- Bamboo leaves, fruit, eggs
Most Notable
It grips bamboo with a sixth digit built from a wrist bone. The giant panda has the same tool and is a bear; this is not a bear, and the two arrived at the thumb entirely separately.
It is filed under Carnivora and eats almost nothing but leaves. Bamboo is poor food and a carnivore's gut is bad at it, so the animal takes over 1.5 kg of fresh leaves a day, digests a fraction of that, and spends most of its waking hours either eating or asleep conserving what it got.
The tail adds another 28 to 48 cm, ringed and thick, used for balance along branches and wrapped over the face as a blanket in the cold.
It is the sole living member of the family Ailuridae. Every other ailurid is a fossil, which makes this one animal the last of an entire branch of the carnivores.
Around 10,000 are thought to be left, in a broken band of mountain forest from Nepal through Bhutan and northern Myanmar into southwestern China, and the trend is still downward.
Range: Mountain forest of the eastern Himalayas and SW China.