Photos of rare brown panda in Shaanxi published

Pandas are not always a matter of black-and-white: they can sometimes be brown.

Xinhua has published a set of photographs of a rare brown panda, a four-year-old male called Qizai or Little Seven, as he eats and plays at his home in mid-western China’s Shaanxi Province Rare Wildlife Rescue and Breeding Research Centre.

Qizai was first spotted in November 2009 when he was about two months old, in Shaanxi’s Foping National Nature Reserve - one of the country’s two giant panda natural reserves. Since then he has been living in the research centre, which plans to start him breeding next year to find whether his offspring will inherit his rare brown colour, according to Xinhua.

“No brown giant panda had been found in Gansu before,” said Ouyang Feng, director of the Giant Panda Department at the Animal Protection Bureau of Gansu Province, to the west of Shaanxi. “What may have caused the genetic change to brown pandas is unknown. However, genetic change could happen to all species including pandas.”

Scientists speculate that inbreeding may be the reason behind the rare brown colour, but it is hard to prove this theory. Many of the roughly 300 giant pandas living in the Foping nature reserve have some brown hair.