China's Wolong National Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province shared footage of a pure white panda on May 27.
Albino panda wandering in the forest. Video : CGTN
The panda is believed to be around five to six years old and appears to have no health problems. The special animal was first spotted on the reserve's cameras in April 2019 at an altitude of 2,000 meters above sea level. The management board released photos of the albino panda with white fur and red eyes in May of that year.
Since then, the managers have deployed a team of experts to monitor the animal, according to CCTV. Scientists have studied the panda’s daily habits and installed motion-activated cameras to record the animal’s movements. The new footage shows it interacting with several other normal black-and-white pandas at 2,600 meters above sea level.
This is the only albino panda ever filmed in the wild, according to Li Sheng, a researcher at Peking University's School of Life Sciences. "We still don't know whether its genes are inherited and transmitted stably in the small panda population. We need to do more in-depth research," Li said.
China also discovered 10 rare brown pandas in the wild between 1985 and 2021, including a male named Qizai, first discovered in November 2009 in the Foping National Nature Reserve in Shaanxi Province. Qizai was about two months old at the time. He is being kept in captivity at the panda breeding research center in the province. The first brown panda found in 1985 was a female named Dandan, who died of cancer in 2000.
The giant panda is native to China, eating bamboo leaves and living mainly in the mountains of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces. China's 2021 biodiversity report says there are about 1,860 pandas in the wild. Albino pandas are the result of an extremely rare genetic mutation that causes the animal to lose the ability to produce melanin.
An Khang (According to SCMP )
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