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Hither'south one thing you lot already knew: red pandas are adorable. While they're non domesticated and therefore are probably not suitable equally pets, some people keep them as pets anyhow - specially in Nepal and India - and upload their adorable hijinks to the internet for the world to see.

Hither are seven other facts about red pandas (Ailurus fulgens) that you might not already know.

1. Crimson pandas aren't pandas. Despite their name, red pandas aren't actually closely related to behemothic pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), but it wasn't until the last ten or fifteen years that scientists settled upon just where red pandas fit on the evolutionary tree of life. It was articulate that crimson pandas were members of the taxonomic "infraorder" Arctoidea, placing them in a grouping with bears, pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walrus), raccoons, and mustelids (weasels, skunks, otters, and badgers). Research published in 2000 in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution determined that they were not most closely related to bears or to raccoons as had been previously suggested. Instead, red pandas class their ain phylogenetic family, alongside skunks, raccoons, and mustelids. From a genetic perspective, they're more like the skunks and raccoons you might find in your ain backyard than the giant pandas with whom they share habitats.

2. Herbivorous carnivoran. Equally a member of the Club Carnivora, the red panda is a carnivoran. Simply unlike most carnivorans, information technology'due south not actually a carnivore. That is, the crimson panda is a mostly an herbivore. It'south really 1 way in which the red panda is more like the giant panda than its genetic relatives: its diet consists near entirely of bamboo leaves, plus bamboo shoots when in flavour, and the occasional fruit, flower, and (rarely) an odd egg or bird. The other carnivoran who is besides primarily herbivorous? The binturong, the funny-looking bearcat that smells like popcorn.

3. Sweet molar. Speaking of diet, carmine pandas similar fake sugar. In a 2009 study in The Journal of Heredity, researchers presented a diverseness of Carnivoran species with bowls of plain water, naturally sweetened water, or artificially sweetened water. They discovered that crimson pandas preferred 3 artificial sugars: neotame, sucralose (Splenda), and aspartame (Nutrasweet or Equal). That makes them the only not-primate species known to be able to taste aspartame, an ability previously thought unique to Old Globe monkeys, apes, and humans.

4. Blending in. Take a look at the ruby-orange tint of the red panda's glaze and you might not immediately call back "expert for camouflage," merely that's where you'd be mistaken. It turns out that the red panda is pretty skilful at hiding from predators by disappearing into the branches of fir trees which are unremarkably covered with cherry-brown moss. Which is pretty handy because decease by snow leopard seems like a particularly bad way to get.

5. A Cheesy Problem. Okay, stay with me on this i. Red pandas, classified as "vulnerable" by the IUCN, are threatened by habitat loss and poaching, despite beingness protected by legislation in the countries where they're institute. Because of that habitat loss, wild populations of blood-red pandas are increasingly fragmented. One fragment that hosts a population of around forty reddish pandas is Nepal's Langtang National Park, in the Himalayas. Even within the national park, those 40 pandas are fragmented into iv groups. In Langtang, the red pandas have another problem, and it'south cheese. Yous see, the park is also dwelling house to two cheese factories that produce a combined 14,000 kilograms of cheese each year to be sold in nearby Kathmandu. To amass the 140,000 liters of milk necessary to make the cheese, farmers keep large herds of chauri, a yak-cow hybrid, and those herds are permitted to graze inside the park. The competition over food sources with the chauri combined with other threats to their lives from the herders and from their dogs has led to the decease of many, many red pandas. "This problem might be solved," write a pair of researchers in the periodical Conservation Biology, "by reducing cheese production and restricting the number of chauri while commensurately increasing the toll of cheese so that farmers' income from milk could remain the same."

6. Cerise pandas tweet. They don't tweet in 140 characters like you or I exercise, but they tweet all the same. Actually, to be accurate, the sound they make is known as "twittering." Take a listen (source):

According to researchers at the National Zoo, twittering seems to mainly used to signal reproductive intent. Which, at present that I call up almost it, is not all that different from some twitterers of our own species either.

vii. It Could Have Been Called The Wah. Red pandas take different names depending on where you lot are. In Nepal, they're called bhalu biralo. Sherpas call the critter ye niglva ponva or wah donka. Just the Western globe did not always call information technology a ruddy panda. In 1821, the English naturalist Major General Thomas Hardwicke made a presentation on the creature at the Linnean Social club in London. That is typically regarded as the moment the cherry-red panda became known in Western science. In his presentation, titled "Description of a new Genus of the Grade Mammalia, from the Himalaya Chain of Hills Between Nepaul and the Snowy Mountains," he argued that the animal be called a "wha," explaining, "Information technology is frequently discovered past its loud cry or telephone call, resembling the word 'Wha', oftentimes repeating the same: hence is derived one of the local names by which information technology is known. It is as well called Chitwa." Unfortunately, Hardwicke's paper wasn't published until 1827, by which time the French zoologist Frédéric Cuvier had already published a clarification of the species along with a drawing. Naming rights, therefore, went to Cuvier.

Flynn J.J., Nedbal M.A., Dragoo J.W. & Honeycutt R.L. Whence the red panda?, Molecular phylogenetics and evolution, PMID:

Pradhan S., Saha K.1000. & Khan J.A. (2001). Ecology of the reddish panda Ailurus fulgens in the Singhalila National Park, Darjeeling, India, Biological Conservation, 98 (1) 11-18. DOI: 10.1016/S0006-3207(00)00079-iii

Li Ten., Glaser D., Li W., Johnson W.East., O'Brien S.J., Beauchamp One thousand.K. & Brand J.One thousand. (2009). Analyses of Sweet Receptor Gene (Tas1r2) and Preference for Sweet Stimuli in Species of Carnivora, Journal of Heredity, 100 (Supplement one) S90-S100. DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esp015

Roberts M.Due south. & Gittleman J.L. (1984). Ailurus fulgens, Mammalian Species, (222) i. DOI: ten.2307/3503840

Roberts M.Southward. & Kessler D.Due south. (1979). Reproduction in Scarlet pandas, Ailurus fulgens (Carnivora: Ailuropodidae), Journal of Zoology, 188 (2) 235-249. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7998.1979.tb03402.ten

YONZON P.B. & HUNTER M.L. (1991). Cheese, Tourists, and Red Pandas in the Nepal Himalayas, Conservation Biology, 5 (two) 196-202. DOI: x.1111/j.1523-1739.1991.tb00124.x

Header photo: Wikimedia Commons/Greg Hume. Other photos: Wikimedia Commons/Jar0d; Wikimedia Eatables/marshmallowbunnywabbit; Wikimedia Commons/Carlos Delgado; Wikimedia Commons/Rainer Halama.