Rare Brown Panda Mystery Solved after 40 Years
Chinese researchers have found the gene responsible for the brown-and-white fur of a handful of giant pandas
Qizai, the world’s only captive brown-and-white panda.
Heng Guoliang/Visual China Group via Getty Images
Not everything in life is always black and white. Neither are giant pandas.
For years, scientists — and the public — in China have been fascinated by Qizai, the only brown-and-white panda in captivity. Found abandoned in the wild, he lives at Louguantai Wild Animal Breeding and Protection Center in Xi’An. Only seven brown-and-white pandas have ever been documented — all from Qinling, a mountain range in the Chinese province of Shaanxi.
Now, a team of researchers has found out why the 14-year-old male bear has such unusual fur, with the findings also likely to apply to wild brown pandas.
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The brown pandas are missing a short sequence of DNA in Bace2, a pigmentation-related gene, according to a study published today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bears in brown
Qinling pandas are “rather different” from those in Sichuan — the province that most giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) inhabit — according to Hu Yibo, a co-author of the paper.
“Previous studies suggested that Qinling pandas may have been separated from Sichuan pandas around 300,000 years ago,” says Hu, a conservation geneticist at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing.
Hu and his colleagues studied the genomic information of three ‘family trios’ — a pair of panda parents and their cub — associated with two brown pandas, along with the genomes of 29 other…
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