Feb. 27, 2014
...China invests billions (click here) to protect giant panda habitat and preserve the 1,600 remaining endangered wildlife icons living there. For years, timber harvesting has been the panda’s biggest threat. Pandas have specific habitat needs – they eat only bamboo and stay in areas with gentle slopes that are far from humans. Conservation programs that limit timber harvesting have chalked up wins in preserving such habitat.
Vanessa Hull, a doctoral student in MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS), has been living off and on for seven years in the Wolong Nature Reserve, most recently tracking pandas she’s equipped with GPS collars. She has been working to better understand how these elusive and isolated animals move about and use natural resources....
...“It didn’t take particular panda expertise to know that something was amiss when we’d come upon horse-affected bamboo patches. They were in the middle of nowhere and it looked like someone had been in there with a lawn mower,” Hull said.
Alarmed by the growing devastation, she learned that some of Wolong’s
farmers, who traditionally hadn’t kept horses, had been talking to
friends outside of the reserve who had been cashing in by raising them. A
horse there, Hull said, is kind of a bank account. Horses were barred
from designated grazing areas because they competed with cattle, so
farmers would let them graze unattended in the forests. When funds were
needed, they would track the animals down and sell them.It was an idea whose popularity skyrocketed. In 1998, only 25 horses lived in Wolong. By 2008, 350 horses lived there in 20 to 30 herds....
Bamboo has a high nutrient content. It is considered a vegetable not a tree or shrub.
The main nutrients in bamboo shoots are protein, amino acid, fat, sugar and inorganic salt. They are rich in protein, containing between 1.49 and 4.04 grams (average 2.65g) per 100g of fresh bamboo shoots. The bamboo protein produces eight essential and two semi-essential amino acids. Although the fat content is comparatively low (0.26-0.94%), it is still higher than in many other vegetables, and the shoots contain rich essential fatty acids. The total sugar content, 2.5% on average, is lower than that in other vegetables. The water content is 90% or more.
One hundred grams of bamboo contains 90.86 gm of water, 2.65 gm of proteing, 0.49 gm of fat, 2.50 gm of sugar, 0.58 gm of crude fiber, 0.88 ash content and produces 10.45 Jewels of heat.
It is also used in oriental food for people. It could be considered a perfect food. It is nutritious enough the species, over time, has adapted it's existence.
