Comments on: Panda paradox: Which came first, a taste for bamboo or a distaste for meat? http://www.esa.org/esablog/research/panda-paradox-which-came-first-a-taste-for-bamboo-or-a-distaste-for-meat/ EcoTone focuses on ecological science in the news and its use in policy, conservation and education. Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:30:32 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Richard http://www.esa.org/esablog/research/panda-paradox-which-came-first-a-taste-for-bamboo-or-a-distaste-for-meat/comment-page-1/#comment-38466 Richard Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:27:22 +0000 http://www.esa.org/esablog/?p=4650#comment-38466 When certain functions in the body aren’t used by you as human being you will lose that function over time. For example when you don’t you your muscles enough than you will lose your muscles eventually because the body ‘thinks’ that it doesn’t need the muscles anymore and to save energy it’s going to lose the muscles. The same goes with bones and probably all other parts of the body.

It might be that the panda couldn’t get enough meat from nature and started to eat bamboo to get it’s nutrition. When the T1R1 function wasn’t being used over a long period of time the gene probably became ‘lazy’ and fell in decline with the result that pandas today choose bamboo over meat.

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