Panda poo shows they have an extremely hard time digesting their favorite food

(Image credit: Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images)

last updated 20 May 2015

They spend 14 hours a day eating bamboo, but panda bears actually have an incredibly difficult time digesting fibrous plants, scientists have discovered.

Researchers with the unenviable job of studying panda poo found that their subjects' guts are mostly covered with bacteria like Streptococcus, which are usually found in meat eaters. In a study published Tuesday in the journal mBio, the authors wrote that 7 million years ago, ancient pandas ate meat but had begun to eat bamboo, and about 2 million years ago, they switched entirely to bamboo. To eat the rough plant, pandas developed a strong jaw and teeth, as well as enlarged pseudothumbs to grab bamboo stems easier.

To collect the samples, researchers worked with 45 healthy pandas living at the Chengdu Research Base. The cubs drank milk, while the juveniles and adults consumed 22 pounds of bamboo and shoots and 1.7 pounds of steamed bread daily. While doing a genetic analysis of the gut bacteria found in the fecal samples, the researchers found that pandas can only digest about 17 percent of the bamboo they eat, and bacteria is different in the late fall, when there aren't any young bamboo shoots to eat. The researchers said they plan to do more studies in order to see how gut bacteria affects health and nutrition.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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