A rare albino giant panda, believed to be the only one of its kind, has again been spotted in the wild in southwestern China.
Camera footage of the almost completely white animal was released by the Wolong National Nature Reserve in Sichuan province, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Saturday, May 27.
The panda was believed to be around five or six years old and did not appear to be suffering from any health problems, according to the report.
The distinctive animal was first seen on cameras in the nature reserve in April 2019, at around 2,000 meters above sea level. The reserve released the first images of the animal in May of that year, showing its white fur and claws and red eyes.
Since then, the reserve authorities had set up a special team to monitor the panda, according to CCTV. The researchers studied the bear’s possible routines and installed and adjusted motion-activated cameras to capture its movements.
The new video also shows the all-white animal interacting with several other black and white giant pandas at an altitude of about 2,600 meters above sea level, according to a report by the state-run People’s Daily.
This is the first recorded albino giant panda in the wild, said Li Sheng, a researcher at Peking University’s college of life sciences, quoted in the CCTV report.
“It is not yet clear whether its gene will be consistently inherited and passed on in the little 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, which 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 been living in captivity at a panda breeding research center in Shaanxi ever since.
The first brown panda to be found was a female named Dandan, seen in 1985. She mated with a normal black and white giant panda and gave birth to three cubs that were all black and white. Dandan died of cancer in 2000.
