Giant Panda Adapts to Environmental Changes Due to Strong Immune System; Study

The elusive Giant Panda adapts easily to changes in the environment because it has a strong immune system, a new study has reported.

Giant Pandas are solitary creatures that go to extreme lengths to avoid contact with each other. Most individual pandas live in the remote, mountainous regions in central China and about 100 of them live in zoos.

The study shows that the bears aren't as vulnerable to environmental changes as experts previously believed.  Even with low reproduction rates, they possess a high genetic diversity within the immune system. A diverse, strong immune system means the species is capable of fighting a pathogen.

For the study, researchers at Zhejiang University in China, analyzed blood or feces from 218 Giant Pandas roaming in six different regions of the country.  Researchers specifically looked at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a group of genes associated with the immune system, Livescience reported.

"The assumption is that a decrease in genetic variation and a lack of exchange between isolated populations increase the likelihood of extinction by reducing the population's ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions," the team wrote in a news release.

Due to the high variation in the genetic coding of the immune system cells, the giant panda's are capable of surviving future threats unlike other endangered animals such as the cheetah.

The Cheetah once roamed in Asia, Africa and even North America. About 10,000 years back, climate change wiped all but one species of the feline carnivore. The dwindling population led to inbreeding, making all cheetahs closely related.

Low genetic variation affects survival capacity of species. Closely related species share about 80 percent of their genes, but cheetahs share as much as 90 percent of their genetic make-up. Experts believe that even pandas have the same genetic similarity due to the limited population.

Paul Hohenlohe, a biologist at the University of Idaho told Livescience that the study could help conservationists develop new strategies to increase the panda count across the globe.

"If you need to capture 10 pandas for a captive breeding program, then you choose those 10 to encompass the most diversity," Hohenlohe told LiveScience. "You can do that by getting them from multiple populations, or one population that has the most diversity." Hohenlohe wasn't part of the current study.

The study is published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, number of Giant Pandas in the wild is increasing, mostly due to conservation efforts from various agencies and the support of local Chinese government. The last full survey of panda population in the wild that took place in 2004 showed that there are about 1,600 pandas in the wild.