9/12/2023 0 Comments Giant red pandaMaybe they maintain some long-distance friendships, but sloths and red pandas are both solitary animals whose adults don’t socialize much except for the necessity of mating. As in, the kind of friends you hang out with socially. Photo: Suzi Eszterhas Cute and soloĪnother similarity between these furry would-be friends is that neither of them really has many friends. Red pandas live in the Himalayas in Nepal, India, Bhutan, Myanmar (Burma), and southern China. Unfortunately for both of them, deforestation and habitat fragmentation are a worldwide problem, and red pandas are endangered and fighting for their survival due to human-caused threats, currently the poaching and illegal trade of their pelt has emerged as a biggest threat. Sloths live in the tropics of the Americas, whereas red pandas live around the borders of the eastern Himalayas, preferably at elevations of 2,000 to 4,300 meters (6,600 to 14,100 feet). Photo: Suzi Eszterhas Tropical rainforest and cold Himalayas Or had any overlapping territories at all, really. Sloths of course eat only tropical leaves, whereas the red pandas eat primarily bamboo, but they might find some food groups in common if only they lived on the same continent. Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you areĪlthough all Musteloidea are in the order Carnivora, red pandas are not particularly carnivorous, which brings us to our first similarity: like sloths, they eat mostly plants! (The giant panda, which we’ll stop talking about now, is actually a kind of bear.) Most recent genetic research, however, places red pandas in their own, independent family: Ailuridae. Sloths are members of the order Xenarthra, related to armadillos and anteaters whereas the red panda is in the superfamily Musteloidea, related to skunks and weasels. Photo: Suzi Eszterhas Family of their own Both species of sloths have evolved to look and act very similar in order to occupy the same ecological niche, whereas the bamboo-eating habits of red and giant pandas have given both animals “false thumbs” in order to better grasp bamboo shoots. In fact, red pandas and giant pandas, like two-fingered sloths and three-fingered sloths, are examples of convergent evolution. “First panda” and “Original panda” seem more appropriate nicknames because western scientists described them 50 years before the giant panda. Red Pandas have also been called the “firefox”, “lesser panda”, and “red-cat-bear”. Red pandas are slightly more related to giant pandas than they are to sloths: the giant and red pandas parted ways just over 30 million years ago… about the time two- and three-fingered sloths diverged. Not to be confused with the giant panda, the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) is a small, furry mammal slightly larger than a house cat and completely unrelated to sloths.
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