The Ancient Whale Graveyard

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Strange by Nature, your guide to the strange, weird, unbelievable and improbable wonders of the natural world.

**Kirk Mona** (0:23)
Hello, everyone, and thanks for being here today. I'm Kirk Mona, and joining me are Rachel Gimza and Victoria Thompson. We're all naturalists who together have scoured the world for weird and wonderful wonders, just to please your mammalian brain's desire for novelty. Isn't that nice?
Let's do this.

**Rachel Gimza** (0:43)
All right, welcome to the show, everyone. I get to get us started this week.

**Kirk Mona** (0:49)
Good to be here.

**Rachel Gimza** (0:50)
I'm so excited. It's always so good to be here.
How are you both?

**Victoria Thompson** (0:55)
Doing fine.

**Kirk Mona** (0:57)
I am great.

**Rachel Gimza** (0:59)
Good.
So it's the year to talk bears. And this year, we've talked sun bears, and we've talked polar bears. That's right. I'm talking about bears this year, and we've got a whopping 10 more bears to go.

**Kirk Mona** (1:18)
So Victoria and I should just randomly start doing some bears just to steal them from you. I mean, you can't do black bears.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:27)
No, no, you can do bears. But I've just determined that we need to talk about bears. So we've got 10 more to go. So number three in our bear breakdown is a bear that was the first to break from the rest of the bears in the phenological timeline, the taxonomy.

**Kirk Mona** (1:49)
Okay. The teddy bear.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:52)
Panda bears.

**Victoria Thompson** (1:53)
Panda bears.

**Kirk Mona** (1:53)
Yeah, those are pretty weird bears. Interesting. Yeah.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:56)
They are pretty one, pretty bizarre. Okay. So let's, yeah, they're really great.

**Victoria Thompson** (2:02)
Yeah, of course.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:03)
So first of all, pandas.
Most of us have a picture in our head when we think of a panda. Now, they are native, of course, to central China and they are pretty widespread. So pandas in general, I would like to say that they're vulnerable. They're not endangered anymore, which is very exciting.

**Kirk Mona** (2:28)
Okay, that's big.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:30)
Now, which is a pretty big deal. Now, a giant panda, they are black and white, not red all over. They look like a bear.
They have the body of a typical bear. So if you think of a teddy bear or anything like that, it's got black fur on its ears, little eye patches on its nose, like muzzle, the legs and the shoulders. The rest of the animal is white, so it's pretty black and white.

**Victoria Thompson** (3:02)
Rachel, why does it look like that? Do you know?

**Rachel Gimza** (3:05)
Did you find out? Scientists don't know why they are black and white. They think that it provides some effective camouflage, but because like they live, as we, hopefully everyone knows, they live in giant bamboo forests. And if they're not moving, they virtually disappear. So they're pretty sure it's just their version of camouflage. Yeah.
Especially since some of the bamboo forests are also on mountain slopes and such, so there can be snow in that area as well.

**Kirk Mona** (3:43)
Interesting. Well, and the black around the eyes is very typical in animals, just to aid in vision and stuff too.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:49)
Yes.

**Victoria Thompson** (3:50)
Which prevents reflecting light into your eyes.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:53)
Exactly. And honestly, we'll get into it a little bit, but pandas need all the help that they can get, because all pandas are nearsighted. They have terrible vision. However, they do have really good sense of hearing, and they have a really, really, really, really good sense of smell as well. Which is really fascinating, because they eat plants, for the most part. Like, famously, eat bamboos.
It is a little weird, however, because they don't have natural enemies. So people kind of go back and forth on the whole camouflage bit, but they could have had enemies at one point. Maybe baby pandas could have that.

**Victoria Thompson** (4:34)
Yeah.

**Rachel Gimza** (4:35)
And they all are really territorial as well. Partially because, like...

**Kirk Mona** (4:42)
I was saying, we see them in zoos a lot. Where they're pretty clean, but in the wild, that white fur is going to be...

**Rachel Gimza** (4:50)
It's going to be pretty muddy and dirty and things.

**Kirk Mona** (4:52)
Yeah. So, like, it's not going to be that beautiful white. And if you look at a lot of photos of pandas, they're not as white as the snow. Like, they get pretty dirty.

**Rachel Gimza** (5:04)
Oh, yeah. I mean, the same thing with polar bears, right? Like, they don't look as white as you would think they would. So pandas generally have really large areas of territory, and they need uninterrupted bamboo forests, and they roam and they eat, and they roam and they eat. They're pretty solitary, which is not necessarily unusual when it comes to bears. However, it is bad for pandas as they are famously, famously terrible at procreating.