How pandas use their heads as a kind of extra limb for climbing
AUSTIN, Texas — Pandas really use their heads to climb. As the pudgy, short-legged bear climbs, it presses its head briefly against the tree trunk again and again, physicist Andrew Schulz said January 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. The head serves as a make-do extra paw, first pressed against one side of the tree and then against the other. This extra pressure helps the bear hold on as it releases and raises an actual paw. Schulz knows of similar behavior only in newborn kangaroos, which use their heads to help haul themselves to their mother’s pouch for the first time. Head moves make sense for panda proportions, said Schulz, speaking for a research collaboration between his university, Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and China’s Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Pandas have the shortest leg-to-body ratio among the world’s eight living bear species. “I like to call them Corgi bears,” he says. How pandas, or...