Different Colored Giant Pandas

2018-03-28

What color is the giant panda in your mind? Maybe everyone will give the same answer: black-and-white. However, besides black-and-white, believe it or not, the giant panda also has some other colors.

 

1. The Pink Panda

 

Covered with only a thin coat of white fur, a newborn panda is tiny and pink, which will not last long. Just after a week, the giant panda cub will start to grow its black-and-white fur. If you want to see this pink babies, please come to the panda base during June to September, for pandas usually deliver babies in summer or fall.

 


A Newborn Baby

 


Half-a-Month-Old Panda Cubs

 

2. The Gray Panda

 

As many of us know, giant pandas are black-and-white. More specifically, a vast majority of them are white with a little yellow, black with a slight of brown. However, in the panda base, there is a special family called Grey family whose members are gray-and-white during their first 4 or 5 months. One of the best known is Cheng Shi, born in 2016, who is the tenth baby of panda mom Cheng Ji. But more amazingly, the gray-and-white fur of all the Grey family members will turn into black-and-white when they are 4 or 5 months old.

 


Two-and-a-Half-Month-Old Cheng Shi

 


About Five-Month-Old Cheng Shi

 


Cheng Shi’s Gray Fur Turning into Black

 


More-than-One-Year-Old Cheng Shi with its Black-and-white fur

 

3. The Brown-and-White Pandas

 

The brown-and-white panda is recognized as a subspecies of the giant panda, and only found in the Qingling mountains. There have only been five sightings of brown-and-white pandas since 1985, and Qi Zai is the fifth one, who thought to be the only living brown-and-white panda in the world. But why is a panda brown-and-white? It is suspected that the brown-and-white colouring of pandas has a genetic basis, possible as a result of a double recessive gene, a combination of genes, or a dilution factor gene. It would take a long time to reveal more mysteries in Qi Zai.

 


Qi Zai in Shaanxi province.(picture from internet)

 

After reading the above information about giant pandas, you would sigh, “what a mystical animal the panda is”. So come on, why not come to the panda base to see these mystical pandas. Maybe you’ll find out more different colors in giant pandas.