All about Bamboo

By
Karen Barnes
– April 14, 2010Posted in: Animal Stories, Pandas

Bamboo. A grass, albeit one that looks like it’s on steroids. Giant panda food. An unwieldy food for keepers to prepare for pandas!

For new keepers to the panda area, the biggest learning curve is identifying the species of bamboo fed out to the pandas. There are some 20 species that tend to be available. That sounds like a lot of species to learn until one discovers there are over 1,200. Even so, in the beginning many of the species look very similar to the untrained eye. One hears comments like, “Ventricosa has crazy-looking branches,” or “Aurea and bambusoides are hardest to tell apart. Bambusoides stems are larger in diameter.” So many details of which to become aware! Since the supply varies day to day, comparison between species may take some time to accomplish.

We feed our 4 pandas approximately 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of bamboo each day. (Yun Zi, our youngest cub, is still nursing and has barely begun to ingest anything other than milk.) That’s a lot of bamboo to supply each day, each week, each year. The bamboo is harvested by our horticultural experts. The usual guy has been dubbed “Johnny Bamboo.” He travels around the Zoo and Wild Animal Park harvesting bamboo for our pandas. It’s a huge job. And a vital one.

The nutritionists have supplied diets for the pandas, determining how much each will be offered at each of the three daily feedings. For example, Bai Yun, our lactating female, receives about 55 pounds (25 kilograms) each day. She receives a large helping first thing in the morning, a smaller serving at midday, and the most in the afternoon to last her overnight.

We have a very large walk-in cooler in which the bamboo is stored. As one enters the bamboo cooler, there are large racks along the back wall, each containing a species of bamboo, tied with twine. One then pulls samples from several different species in order to complete a bundle for a given feeding. The vertical stem of bamboo is called a culm. The pandas receive large sections of thick culm for the favored starchy material around the inside. In order to decrease tooth wear, we break open the culm for them. One always knows when bamboo diets are being made: the sound of culm sections being thrown onto the ground in order to split open can be heard by hopeful pandas as well as staff working in the area. The culm portion of the diet is supplemented by a large volume of leafy bamboo. The volume of most bundles is large. It becomes a challenge to wrap twine around the bundle in such a way that the bundle can easily be carried and not have the smoother, thick culm sections fall out. The weight of each species is noted as well as the total weight of each bundle for each feeding.

When each exhibit is cleaned, the large, leftover bamboo pieces are gathered together and tied into a bundle. The smaller pieces are raked into a trash bag. The bundle of new bamboo is then placed on exhibit or inside a bedroom, depending on the location and time of day. The bamboo leftovers are then weighed and those numbers are recorded.

Thus, for panda keepers, there is a lot of repetition over the course of the day as three feedings are cleaned and weighed and new bamboo made available. However, these efforts are certainly worthwhile in order to care for these unique, charismatic animals!

Some bamboo facts

Bamboo is a versatile plant, used as food for people and animals, timber, paper pulp, musical instruments, toys, fabrics, medicines. It may prevent landslides or the collapse of riverbanks where there are erosion problems or during an earthquake. It is stronger than wood in tension or compression, and yet one can easily cut through the culm. During an atomic bomb blast, bamboo survived the radiation while the incinerating heat destroyed trees and wooden structures.

Bamboo species generally have one of two growing habits: running or clumped. This division is based on whether the underground stems, called rhizomes, grow far from the parent stem prior to sending up more stems above the ground. The bamboo culm (stem) is usually hollow, with solid areas at the ends of each segment (node).

Bamboo lacks the cambium layer found in many plants such as trees. Without this layer, the bamboo doesn’t grow in diameter over time, as a typical tree would.

During the growing season, temperate bamboo species grow the most during the day, while tropical bamboos grow more overnight. One species of timber bamboo can grow as much as 4 feet in a 24-hour period. In some species, branches develop while the culm is till growing in height. In others, branches develop only after the culm attains its full height.

Some species of bamboo flower at long intervals. The range can vary every 4 to 120 years, depending on the species. If one takes a seed or part of a culm stock and grows it elsewhere in the world, it will flower at the same time as the parent plant, regardless of geographical location, climatic conditions, soil differences, or age of clump.

Karen Barnes is a senior keeper at the San Diego Zoo.

RELATED POSTS

Tags: , , ,