Captive pandas outside of the latitude of their normal habitat range tend to be less active.
Most living things on Earth have an internal clock that ticks at the schedule of a circadian rhythm. Environmental factors can throw off this rhythm, and for animals that live in zoos, these factors are different compared to animals living in the wild.
“Animals, including humans, have evolved rhythms to synchronize their internal environment with the external environment,” said Kristine Gandia, a psychology Ph.D. student at the University of Stirling and lead author of the study in a Pandas in the wild live seasonally synched lives, making them the ideal species for researchers to understand how circadian clocks dictate their behavior. Because pandas prefer to eat specific bamboo species and especially love new shoots, they migrate towards the sprouts every spring. This migratory season also notes the beginning of the breeding season.
To fully understand captive pandas, Gandia and her team used webcams to monitor 11 giant pandas at zoos located within the animal’s natural latitudinal range and outside of it, every month for a year. The scientists did a day’s worth of hourly observations to see how the panda’s behavior changed from season to season.
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