They discover that a famous Chinese panda is female and not male four years after its birth

2024-01-26 08:38:54

Updated Friday, January 26, 2024 – 09:38

He panda gigante He Yeone of the most famous in the Chengdu Panda Breeding Research Base (panda breeding China), has turned out to be female and not male, as was thought since she was born in 2020.

The news broke this week and has attracted the attention of millions of Chinese Internet users, although it is not the first time it has happened because determining the sex of this breed has until now proven to be a complex task.

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The birthplace of giant pandas that awakens Chinese nationalism in the green city of Chengdu

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The birthplace of giant pandas that awakens Chinese nationalism in the green city of Chengdu

In a video posted by the Base on the Weibo network – similar to who convinced everyone that he was a male.”

However, as he grew older he stopped developing masculine characteristics, so the institution asked an expert to will take biological samples from the animalwhich confirmed that she is female, said her breeder, also in charge of He Ye’s older sister, called He Hua and affectionately ‘Hua Hua’.

The hashtag “He Ye is not a little brother but a little sister” went viral on Chinese networks on Wednesday after the news broke, with about 200 million views and comments in which Internet users were happy that the sisters can continue living together, since if they had been male and female they would have been separated eventually.

Although the news came as a surprise, It is not the first time that a panda turns out to be of the opposite sex who was believed when he was born: the father of He Ye and He Hua, born at the American Zoo in Atlanta in 2006, was initially identified as female, something that also happened with the brothers Pu Pu and Fa Fa, born in 2014 in Chengdu.

The gender of newborn pandas is generally difficult to determine because they do not show secondary sexual characteristics and his genitals are partially hiddenalthough in recent times techniques have been developed -both physical examination and molecular analysis- to obtain this information in a more reliable way.