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• Giant pandas spend twelve to fourteen hours a day feeding. They can eat over 25 pounds of bamboo shoots and stems daily. Pandas need vast areas of bamboo forest to provide enough food for them. But the forests are being taken over by farmers, who need the space to grow food for China's many people. Although trees are being cut for good reason - to make paper and clear the land for farming - it destroys the only places where pandas can live.
• There are many varieties of bamboo, but giant pandas in the wild only like to eat three kinds. These are called "walking stick" bamboo, "umbrella" bamboo, and "cold arrow" bamboo. Every few years, these bamboos flower, produce seeds, and then die. It takes many years for the new seed to grow into bamboo big enough for the giant pandas to eat. The "cold arrow" bamboo takes twenty years to grow back.
• Giant pandas rarely leave their home territories which are about five square miles. When the bamboo there flowers and dies, the pandas never think about moving to another area to find food. They stay where they are and starve to death. The worst disaster happened in the spring of 1976, when the bamboo flowered and died in parts of China. More than 140 giant pandas died of starvation.
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