Panda Mother Teaches Cub How to Eat Bamboo | 4K UHD | China: Nature's Ancient Kingdom | BBC Earth

China has some of the world's most abundant and diverse bamboo forests. In the giant panda park, they are critically important, supplying 99% of the panda's diet, making it the perfect place for a mother to raise her cub. With each passing day, this youngster is being prepared for adult life. Today's lesson is how to eat bamboo. It's not as simple as it sounds. It must be fresh. The cane must be split perfectly. The most digestible part is inside. The enormous jaw muscles needed to crunch bamboo are what give pandas their characteristic round faces. The youngster practices on a stick. As an adult, she'll eat 40 kilograms of bamboo a day. Pandas evolved with the carnivore's digestive system, which means they are born lacking the key plant-processing gut bacteria they need. During weaning, a seemingly affectionate exchange between mother and baby may be a way of passing her cub crucial bamboo-digesting microbes through her saliva. When the cub is weaned at around 18 months, they will separate, and the youngster must go it alone.