It's all in the diet. Why pandas have such a relaxed attitude.

About The Giant Panda
The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca -  meaning black and white cat foot) originates from south central China where it lives on a diet of 99% bamboo, occasionally eating grasses and carrion.
They are currently around 1800 giant pandas living wild; classifying them as an endangered species by IUCN.
Adult pandas are between 4-6ft long and a male can weigh up to 160kg (350lbs), females are smaller in size being between 10-20% less weighing from 70kg (150lbs) to 125kg (276lbs). In captivity they live up to 30 years whilst in the wild it is around 20.
They live solitary lives communicating to neighbors by scent marking, this is achieved by scratching trees and spraying urine.

Its not easy to study pandas
As mentioned previously, the giant panda is endangered and it is this factor alongside its popularity and political importance that makes the study of wild giant pandas somewhat difficult. When any scientific research is undertaken on a animal species, they are many procedures and regulations that need to be followed of which are even more tightly regulated when it comes to pandas. Therefore our knowledge of pandas has been a under researched area but which is now slowing gaining ground; leading to this discovery.

Its all about the diet
The giant panda belongs to the order known as Carnivora, this group includes dogs/foxes/wolves (canids), cats (felids), seals/sealions/walruses (pinnipeds), weasels/stoats etc (mustelids) and bears (ursids). It is however important to mention that just because these species are found within the order Carnivora that they are not all strictly meat eaters, in fact this title applies only to the cats (felids) whilst the rest are manly omnivorous (eating a mixture of both meat and plant material). All animals within this order have short digestive tracts due to meat being easily digested by the body, the giant panda has a gut similar to that of a lion yet, eats a diet that many consists of plant material known as bamboo. The panda has numerous adaptations for eating bamboo, such as a 'thumb' this is not actually a thumb at all but a modified wrist bone, despite all these adaptions the panda's short gut means it has to eat roughly 10-20kgs (22-44lbs) of bamboo a day, as it is unable to properly digest it. It is due to this poor digestion and low quality food that scientists thought giant pandas had a low metabolism (the set of life sustaining chemical reactions which occur within body cells) to survive.

Taking it easy
The metabolism rate of giant pandas had not been studied until recently when a team of scientists used a technique called the doubly-labelled water method which measures the rate at which an animal eliminates stable isotopes (an atom which contains the same number of protons or positive charge but a different number of neutrons or negative charge) from their body. This involved 5 captive giant pandas from Beijing zoo and 3 wild giant pandas from Foping nature reserve.
It was shown that giant pandas do have a very slow metabolism, lower then that of most other mammals and more similar to that of a reptile. How the giant pandas achieved such a low rate of energy was studied in a second experiment. It is known that most of the energy used by the body is taken by few organs such as the brain, liver and kidneys. In the giant panda the brain is 82% less then the expected size, kidneys 74.5 and the liver 62.8% for that of an 90kg mammal. Giant pandas also were found to move only at a rate of 26.9 meters per hour as tracked using GPS loggers.
The giant pandas also had unusual thyroid hormones (the hormone responsible for regulating metabolism/energy), this was found to be due to a mutation within the giant panda genome (complete set of DNA) which affects the production of thyroid hormones. It is known that people who suffer with low thyroid levels often feel the cold more then those that do not, so how does the giant panda stay warm? Giant pandas have a thick fur coat; this traps what little heat is produced by the body. This causes the outer surface of the panda's body to be 10 degrees cooler then that of other black and white animals such as zebras.

As always feel free to leave any thoughts/comments in the box below and thanks for taking the time to read this and visit my blog, until next time keep it wild!

Well that's one way to cause a headache! Flatworm mates with its own head!

What are flatworms?
Platyhelminthes or flatworms are unsegmented, bilaterial (have front/back and upside/downside), soft bodied invertebrates (lack a vertebral (spinal) column). They have no body cavity and are referred to as acoelomates, they have a flattened body shape due to lacking specialized circulatory and respiratory organs i.e blood/lungs, the flattened shape allows oxygen to diffuse (a process in which a substance moves from a area of high amount to one which is lower) into their bodies easily.
Free living flatworms are either found in water or humid areas such as leaf litter on land tapeworms (Cestodes) and flukes (Trematodes) have parasitic lifestyles which are often complex and involve multiple hosts in fact, the second most deadly human disease is called by the pork tapeworm (Taenia solium) which is the main cause of epilepsy worldwide when their larvae infect the human nervous system.

Procotyla fluviatilis

What they discovered
Scientists from the University of Basel based in Switzerland and Bielefield University based in Germany, discovered that the flatworm Macrostomum hystrix, an hermaphrodite possessing both male and female reproductive organs, uses self insemination when it is unable to locate a mate. Normally reproduction occurs with these flatworms by exchanging of sperm between two individuals via a stylet (a needle like protrusion) and is described as 'traumatic insemination'. 
The study divided flatworms into two groups one which was isolated and the other which consisted of small groupings of individuals. The amount of sperm possessed by each flatworm was measured and it was found that isolated individuals contained more in their head. Self insemination was never witnessed but the placement suggests a interesting insemination route, with the sperm migrating from the head to the center of the body where fertilization occurred. The flatworms that were kept in groups differed however by having sperm located in their tails.
This therefore could be the first case of flatworms using their needle like penis to eject sperm into their own head, it is suggested this may be due to there being no internal link between their male and female organs.

As always feel free to leave any thoughts or comments in the box below, thanks for taking the time to visit and read my blog and finally until next time keep it wild!!!!