The Wildlife in China
2 min readChina is one of the countries with the greatest diversity of wildlife in the world. There are more than 6,266 species of vertebrates,10% of the world’s total. Among them,2,404 are terrestrial and 3,862 fishes. There are more than 100 wild animal species unique to China including such well-known rare animals as the giant panda, golden-haired monkey, South China tiger, brown-eared pheasant, red-crowned crane, crested ibis, Yangtze River dolphin, takin, Chinese Alligator and so on.
China lies in two of the world’s major zoogeographic regions, the Palaearctic and the Oriental. The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions, northeastern China, and all areas north of the Yellow River are in the Palaearctic region.
Central, southern, and southwest China lie in the Oriental region. In the Palaearctic zone, many important mammals are found such as the river fox, horse, camel, tapir, mouse hare, hamster, and jerboa. Among the species found in the Oriental region are the civet cat, Chinese pangolin, bamboo rat, tree shrew, gibbon and various other species of monkeys and apes. Some overlap exists between the two regions because of natural dispersal and migration, and deer or antelope, bears, wolves, pigs, and rodents are found in all of the diverse climatic and geological environments. The famous giant panda is found only in a few mountain ranges in Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces.
A giant panda weighs on average 135 kg and lives on tender bamboo leaves and bamboo shoots. Because it is extremely rare-just over 1,500 are left at present-it has become the symbol of the world’s protected wild animals. The red-crowned crane, which could be as tall as 1.2 m, is covered with white feathers, with a distinctive patch of exposed red skin crowning its head and is regarded as a symbol of longevity in East Asia. The Yangtze River dolphin is one of only two species of freshwater whalesin the world. In 1980,a male Yangtze River dolphin was caught for the first time in the Yangtze River, which aroused great interest among dolphin researchers worldwide.
