The diet of giant pandas affects their microbiome – which might impact their willingness to mate Pete Oxford/Steve Bloom Images/Alamy
Giant pandas aren’t having enough sex to grow their populations, and their gut microbes might be to blame.
Habitat destruction and climate change already make it hard for giant pandas to survive. They also face an additional challenge: they struggle to reproduce, especially in captivity. Pandas are solitary creatures, and females have just one fertile window of about 40 hours each year. Meanwhile, males aren’t very promiscuous, and they don’t know how to mount females…
