A two-year-old giant panda at a Dutch zoo has caused a stir by turning out to be a female and not a male as initially thought.
The discovery at the Ouwehands Zoo was made during a routine medical check-up on Fan Xing, who was the first giant panda to be born in the Netherlands.
The zoo's manager confirmed the news on national television late Thursday.
"Fan Xing surprised us," said Jose Kok, in a statement released by the zoo after the broadcast interview.
"For us, the sex was just a fact we wanted to check during the exam under anaesthesia, to be sure."
The panda underwent a short medical examination a few months after being born, which has to be done quickly so that the baby can be reunited with its mother.
But Kok said that determining sex is difficult in a young baby not under anaesthetic.
"We were so convinced the baby was male we never doubted it," she said.
Fan Xing was born on May 1 to two giant pandas — mum Wu Wen and dad Xing Ya — who were loaned to the Netherlands by China in 2017 for 15 years.
Her name was revealed in October. "Fan" is a reference to the Chinese name for Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and "Xing" means star, a reference to van Gogh's famous painting, Starry Night.
She will soon be sent back to China as planned as part of an international breeding programme.
Giant pandas were removed from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's red list of endangered species in 2016.
Mystery of glass frog transparency solved, researchers say
Washington DC (UPI) Dec 23, 2021 –
Researchers say they have solved the mystery of how glass frogs become mostly transparent while they sleep. The discovery may lead to innovations in how to understand blood clotting.
Researchers Jesse Delia, of the Museum of Natural History in New York, and Carlos Taboada, of Duke University, teamed up to solve the mystery after Delia witnessed a glass frog sleeping in Panama.
The species is the only known terrestrial animal that can maintain transparency on the inside and outside.
"Using photoacoustic imaging to track red blood cells in vivo, we show that resting glass frogs increase transparency two- to threefold by removing [about] 89% of their red blood cells from circulation and packing them within their liver," according to the study published online Thursday in Science.
The researchers beamed lasers at the frogs to track the movements of individual blood cells and found that they store their red blood cells in their liver, while flooding the rest of their circulatory system with plasma as they sleep.
When they wake, the red blood cells quickly flow back into their circulatory system. The glass frog's liver also is coated with a film of crystals that block out the redness of the blood inside.
"They somehow pack most of the red blood cells in the liver, so they're removed from the blood plasma. They're still circulating plasma … but they do it somehow without triggering a massive clot," Delia told BBC.
It is not understood how the frogs are able to survive for long periods with most of their red blood cells stored in their liver. It also is not understood how the frogs are able to store so much blood in their livers without causing a catastrophic clot.
The fact that the frogs can store so many red blood cells without suffering from clots could offer insight into blood clotting in humans, the researchers said.
"Glass frogs' ability to regulate the location, density and packing of red blood cells without clotting offers insight in metabolic, hemodynamic and blood-clot research," the study said.
