Hua Mei, the baby panda born at the San Diego Zoo in 2000. Picture taken summer 2001.
Picture contributed by TimShell [full size image]
Despite being taxonomically a carnivore, its diet is overwhelmingly vegetarian. In fact, it lives almost entirely on bamboo?, although like most animals pandas have been known to eat eggs, and they consume some insects along with their bamboo diet.
It is also distantly related to the [red panda]?, but the shared name appears to derive from their common bamboo diet.
Pandas are an endangered species, threatened by continued loss of their habitat and by a low birthrate, both in the wild and in captivity. The panda is the symbol of the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation organization (http://www.wwf.org).
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