This is the first albino giant panda recorded in the wild, Li Sheng, a researcher at Peking University’s school of life sciences, was quoted as saying in the CCTV report.
“It is still unclear whether its gene will be inherited and steadily passed on in the small panda population, and more follow-up research is needed,” he said.
China also discovered 10 rare brown giant pandas in the wild between 1985 and 2021, according to state media.
Among them is a male named Qizai, who was first spotted in November 2009 at the Foping National Nature Reserve in northwestern China’s Shaanxi province.
Qizai was about two months old when he was discovered and has since been living in captivity at a panda breeding research centre in Shaanxi.
The first brown panda to be found was a female named Dandan, spotted in 1985. She was mated with a regular black-and-white giant panda and gave birth to three cubs that were all black-and-white. Dandan died of cancer in 2000.
Giant pandas are native to China and mainly live in the mountains of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces. China’s 2021 biodiversity report said there were about 1,860 of them in the wild.
This article was first published on SCMP.
Source: CNA
