The k2p blog

A brown panda named Qizai in a wildlife research center in northwest China’s Shannxi Province. (Photo: CCTV)

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-08/25/c_132660293.htm

UPI:

The four-year-old male, named Qizai (“Little Seven”), is one of only five brown pandas discovered since 1985 and the only one in captivity, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported Monday.

Qizai was first spotted as a two-month-old cub in a mountainous region of Shaanxi Province — the only known area to contain brown pandas — nearly four years ago. Around 20 percent of China’s total panda population, around 300 animals, live in the region, researchers said.

One expert who has been conducting research in the region for 20 years suggests brown pandas may be a result of a recessive gene and inbreeding.

“The habitat in the Qinling Mountains is seriously fragmented and the population density is very high,” Tiejun Wang, a spatial ecologist at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, was quoted as saying by the journal Nature. “The brown pandas could be an indication of local inbreeding.”

 

Tags: Brown panda, China, Giant panda, Panda, Qizai

This entry was posted on August 29, 2013 at 9:05 am and is filed under China, Wildlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.