pedrosanchez:

I like pandas. But octopuses…they just can’t beat octopuses.

This is great! From the article:

Much ado is made about the plight of the panda. Pandas are endangered due to habitat destruction, the Chinese tradition of poaching, and a hilariously low birth rate. While their exact fertility rates are unknown (it’s kind of a personal question), most experts believe that pandas reproduce once every ten million years. This has prompted aggressive captivity breeding programs. These never work, because getting pandas to mate is like launching a satellite into orbit. Simply put, pandas and mating are like Quakers and military drafts. Zookeepers have even resorted to showing them pornography, which is more a measure of desperation than scientific training.

Every so often captive pandas will mate (always by accident), and the local news then runs endless loops of a gross panda cub in an incubator as it plots a life of not mating.

Pandas’ problems come from their basic refusal to act like real bears. First of all, real bears like to mate. Real bears also eat things they’re supposed to eat. But pandas, despite having the digestive tract of a carnivore that cannot effectively digest cellulose, nevertheless insist on keeping to a diet that is 90 percent bamboo. This means that they have to feed constantly, subtracting from time that could otherwise be spent at least pretending to care about mating.