Giant pandas turn out to be a lot more social -- and flirtatious -- than anyone had ever imagined.

Vanessa Hull of Michigan State University and her colleagues were given permission to attach GPS tracking collars to five pandas in the Wolong National Nature Reserve in China. The collars transmitted each animal's position every four hours for up to two years.

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The five pandas were Pan Pan, Mei Mei and Zhong Zhong (three adult females), Long Long (a young female), and Chuan Chuan (a male).

Researchers discovered the home ranges of individual pandas overlapped and on a few occasions, two animals spent several weeks in close proximity.

"Sometimes the pandas were within 10 or 20 meters of each other, which suggests the pandas were in direct interaction. This happened in autumn, and pandas mate in spring, so it was probably not mating behavior," said Hull.

The study suggests that pandas are laid back about neighbors.

"Pandas seem to be quite happy to have other pandas nearby. They're not charging around defending mutually exclusive territories," said Stuart Pimm of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Hull's team found out these huggable mammals rotated between several important areas, probably following patches of bamboo, their only food source.

The GPS tracking revealed the five pandas returned to their favorite dining spots after being gone for long periods of time, or up to six months. This suggests they remember successful feasting experiences, and return in anticipation of regrowth.

While the wild panda population has increased nearly 17 percent to 1,864, the bears are still threatened by habitat fragmentation, human impacts and climate change.

Researchers are still learning about giant panda sex lives. The Chinese government is protective of its endangered pandas and for more than a decade banned putting GPS collars on them, so data is still relatively scarce.

The study was published in the Journal of Mammalogy.

TagsPandas are Sociable, GPS Tracking Revealed, Panda, Giant Panda, bear, Mammals, panda population