Giant pandas' secret social life revealed 

Giant pandas\' secret social life revealed

Everyone needs friends. Even giant pandas. It turns out that they are more sociable than we thought, hanging out together for weeks at a time.

We know very little about wild pandas because they are so rare and live in almost impenetrable forest. But in 2010 and 2011, Vanessa Hull of Michigan State University and her colleagues were given permission to attach GPS tracking collars to five pandas in the Wolong National Nature Reserve in China. The collars transmitted each animal\'s position every four hours, for up to two years.

The team found that the home ranges of individual pandas overlapped and on a few occasions, two animals spent several weeks in close proximity. "Sometimes the pandas were within 10 or 20 metres of each other, which suggests the pandas were in direct interaction," Hull says. This happened in autumn, and pandas mate in spring, so it was probably not mating behaviour.

No one knows yet whether these panda hangouts are a sign of some social behaviour we didn\'t know about, or whether the pandas simply aren\'t concerned enough to move away if another panda is close. It is clear, though, that they are laid back about neighbours. "Pandas seem to be quite happy to have other pandas nearby," says Stuart Pimm of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "They\'re not charging around defending mutually exclusive territories."

The team also found that pandas rotated between several core areas, probably following patches of bamboo, their only food source. "They kind of eat their way out of the bamboo, and when it\'s depleted they move on," says Hull.

Hull\'s experiment is just a first, brief glimpse into the lives of a few pandas. "We hope the Chinese government sees the value of doing this kind of study and encourages more of it in the future," she says.

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