Red pandas frolic in the snow

February 20, 2015 • 3:25 pm

When I started graduate school, the red panda, Ailurus fulgens, was thought to be the closest living relative to the giant panda, mainly, I guess, because it sort of resembles the giant panda (both have a mask), lives in the same general area, and is arboreal, though it doesn’t eat bamboo.  In fact, it wasn’t even certain that the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleucans) was a bear, but that was settled with Vince Sarich’s aptly titled paper in Nature in 1973: “The giant panda is a bear.” (That’s one of the best paper titles I’ve ever seen.) Using immunological distances, Sarich showed that the giant panda was closely related to bears and much less closely related to red pandas or to the raccoon (the alternative theory, since raccoons also have masks).

We now know that the red panda (also insultingly called the “lesser panda”) is more closely related to weasels, raccoons, and skunks than to any bear, although it’s sufficiently unique to be the only species in its family (Ailuridae, though there’s some dispute about this, for higher-level classification is somewhat arbitrary). But here’s the phylogeny of several species showing the relationships I just described, as well as the approximate dates when the lineages diverged:

15_17MolecularPhylogeny-L copy

At any rate, the two species have another thing in common: both the greater and lesser pandas love to frolic in the snow. Here’s a recent video of red pandas having a high old time at the Cinncinnati Zoo:

h/t: Blue

39 thoughts on “Red pandas frolic in the snow”

  2. OMG! You wrote “sufficiently unique”! This is actually a perfectly sensible construction in this context, IMO, and puts the lie to claims of language pedants that “unique” can never be qualified.

    2. I’m going to try to explain why something can be “more unique” than something else that is also unique.

      Suppose we have a set S={x_i} of members such that each member has properties p_1 OR p_2 OR P_3. Except for two and only two members, x_1 and x_2, all members of the set have properties p_1 AND p_2 AND p_3. The member x_1 has properties p_1 AND p_2, but not p_3. The member x_2 has property p_1, but not p_2 and not p_3. Both are unique, but x_2 can meaningfully be said to be more unique than x_1.

  3. What do Babu the red panda and Malala Yousafzai have in common? Both were adopted enthusiastically by my city of residence. And Babu was named Brummie of the Year, 2005. He escaped the Nature Centre for 4 days and was found a mile away. Alas, he now lopes in panda heaven, if Pope Frank has got his theology right. x

      1. Yes, nice pics, M Janello. They spend a lot of time high up in trees. What the Birmingham Nature Centre didn’t notice was that Babu could walk from the branches in his enclosure to other trees outside the enclosure. Dumb or what?

        Definitively honorary cats. I’ve never seen an animal lope, cartoon-like, as a red panda does.

        The front and back legs curl around each other, all 4 legs appear to be off the ground, they shufty, the head lollops from side to side, the natural smile, ailuring, rebellious benevolence animalified. x

      2. I would not mind if somehow red pandas became endemic to DC. This is probably wrong of me. At least the zoo is free, so the pandas can be viewed as often as I feel like going I guess.

  5. One of my favourite memories is going to our local zoo in winter, when no one else was about, and watching the red pandas frolic in the snow much like this. (What was especially amusing was that when a loud group of children approached, the pandas scurried back into their dens, but my spouse and I waited quietly for them to pass, and after the kids were gone, the pandas came back out and resumed their playtime.)

    1. I greatly sympathize with the red pandas. Kids are obnoxiously loud, even when they’re not trying to be.

  8. That’s my zoo! And the damned things are asleep every time I go. Sadly, I only get to enjoy their hijinks on video.

  9. Having spent my childhood in a land with many bears but no pandacoons, I found the graph to be informative and thought-provoking.

  10. Animals have fur coats for winter. They look so cute in snow… Can you imagine naked apes enjoying snow without wearing anything? Will furry people resist cold better than fair skin? 🙂

  11. D. Dwight Davis of the Field Museum got to dissect the giant panda Mei Lan after it died at the Brookfield Zoo in 1952. His detailed monograph, in the Fieldiana series, was published in 1964. The conclusion was that “the aggregate of many anatomical features shows that the giant panda is a highly specialized bear”.

    So Vincent Sarich’s immunological distance work was confirming the most careful anatomical study, published 9 years before.

    Davis’s monograph can be read online here.

  12. I just adore red pandas, and they’re so gorgeous playing in the snow! I’m not a cuddly toy person, but I bought one of a red panda after seeing them at Auckland zoo.

  13. The red panda does eat bamboo… I know this not just from Googling[1], but from volunteering at the Houston Zoo, which has three on exhibit.

    I’m often pointing out to visitors that “panda” essentially means “cute bamboo-eater,” though I should add “masked,” now that you’ve mentioned it. Another convergent fact: both pandas have false thumbs, derived from extended wrist bones.

    [1] From Wikipedia: The red panda “feeds mainly on bamboo, but is omnivorous and also eats eggs, birds, insects, and small mammals.”

  14. I’d like to see a paper entitled: The Veracity of the Sylvan Excretory Habits of the Ursidae

  15. I saw this clip on the news tonight. I love the wiggling in the snow. The panda almost seems to be smiling.

  16. Another species that wear a mask similar to those of red pandas and raccons is the tanuki or raccoon d*g (Nyctereutes procyonoides).

    Desnes

  19. The phylogeny diagram made me wonder about the “spectacled bear”, which I’d never heard of, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Pretty cool.

  20. Red Pandas also have the same evolved pseudo thumb (a wrist bone that acts as an opposable thumb) that giant pandas have to enable both species to grasp bamboo stalks ( they eat loads of bamboo)

    They were also discovered by western science first making them possibly the real panda and the giant panda the imposter to their title.

  21. That phylogenetic tree from Pearson education is severly out of date! The Red Panda does not belong to the family Procyonidae, but is the only species in its own family, Ailuridae.
    See: Eizirik et al , 2010. Pattern and timing of diversification of the mammalian order Carnivora inferred from multiple nuclear gene sequences. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 5: 49–63, and several earlier studies. Wikipedia has it right.

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