How pandas use their heads as a kind of extra limb for climbing
Short legs on a chubby body demand a work-around when it comes to getting up a tree
![Panda climbing](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/012220_sm_panda_feat.jpg?fit=1028%2C579&ssl=1)
Pandas’ chubby body proportions require an unusual work-around for climbing trees.
Hung_Chung_Chih/iStock/Getty Images Plus
By Susan Milius
AUSTIN, Texas — Pandas really use their heads to climb.
As the pudgy, short-legged bear climbs, it presses its head briefly against the tree trunk again and again, physicist Andrew Schulz said January 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. The head serves as a make-do extra paw, first pressed against one side of the tree and then against the other. This extra pressure helps the bear hold on as it releases and raises an actual paw. Schulz knows of similar behavior only in newborn kangaroos, which use their heads to help haul themselves to their mother’s pouch for the first time.
Head moves make sense for panda proportions, said Schulz, speaking for a research collaboration between his university, Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and China’s Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Pandas have the shortest leg-to-body ratio among the world’s eight living bear species. “I like to call them Corgi bears,” he says.
How pandas, or any other big mammals, climb hasn’t gotten the analytic attention that techniques of squirrels and other small animals have, Schulz said. Yet rushing up a tree trunk can be a lifesaving move in the wild for pandas attacked by feral dogs. Chengdu researcher James Ayala conceived the climbing study to get the first quantitative data on emergency escape skills in captive-bred youngsters. Such information helps the Chengdu researchers judge young pandas’ chances of surviving in the wild.