Panda, red: India

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Chinese Red Panda 

Presence in India

Rohan Dua, January 21, 2021: The Times of India

Contrary to the previously held belief that only one species of red panda is found in India, Indian scientists have established that the country is home to both the Himalayan Red Panda (HRP) and the Chinese Red Panda (CRP). In doing so they have also countered a Chinese study published in February 2020 which claimed that CRP is not present in India.

Indian scientists, in this breakthrough study based on the DNA from faecal samples collected over a span of three years, have said that two phylogenetic (sub-species) of HRP and CRP exist in the country. The study was published in Nature (Scientific Reports) as well as in German Society of Mammalian Biology last week. The study paper has been jointly authored by Zoological Survey of India’s (ZSI) director Dr Kailash Chandra along with seven other Indian scholars. The paper makes a revelation that the red panda actually diverged into the Chinese and the Himalayan sub-species about 0.3 million years ago.

The red panda has lost 50% of its population in the last 20 years and now only 2500 individuals survive in the wild in India, China, Tibet, Nepal, Myanmar and Bhutan. The Indian scientists have also contradicted the Chinese claim that the Siang river in Arunachal Pradesh is the potential boundary that divides the two sub-species. The Chinese study, by scientist Yibo Hu, had claimed that Yalu Zangbu river near Tibet was the geographic barrier for the divergence of red panda species into two varieties.

“We collected 132 faecal samples —- 29 from northwest Bengal, 28 from Sikkim and 75 from Arunachal. Genomic DNA was extracted-...sequencing was performed...We also downloaded 44 complementary sequences of red panda available in the public domain,” said Dr Mukesh Thakur, scientist, ZSI. In contrast, the Chinese study analysed only 18 samples from Nepal. Indian scientists found that DNA samples of red pandas in Arunachal’s Dibang Valley matched those of CRP.

The HRP was found to be active largely on the west of Siang river as established from samples collected from Darjeeling, Sikkim, south Tibet, western and central Arunachal and “concludes that we have presence of both sub-species”.