Giant panda Hehua’s “sibling brothers” have become “sibling sisters”! After three and a half years of misgendering, giant panda He Ye was confirmed to be a girl!

About this incident on the Internet Report on the Dragon Incident

In fact, the giant panda gender misunderstanding incident is not an isolated case. The more famous incident of "mistakenly mistaking a man for a woman" also happened to happen in Hehua and Heye. On Daddy Meilan’s body. When Meilan, an "overseas Chinese living in the United States," returned, she launched a vigorous son-in-law selection campaign. As a result, before the ceremony was over, Meilan showed a series of male giant panda estrus behaviors - she failed to choose her son-in-law, and she became the uncle.

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Body differences

In addition to the difficult-to-distinguish external genitalia, it is also a way to identify the differences in body shape between female and male animals. Commonly used gender determination methods.

Take relatives of the Ursidae family as an example. Male Asian black bears have a distinct ring of mane around their necks. Male brown bears have larger faces than females and are significantly stronger in body. These are The differences can be seen relatively intuitively. However, the differences in appearance and body shape between female and male giant pandas are not significant, and it is difficult to distinguish them in terms of face shape, body shape, and posture.

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Behavioral Characteristics

So when judging the gender of giant pandas through visual inspection, some behavioral characteristics that are easier to observe are often used as judgments. basis. For example, male giant pandas will make more climbing movements during play, and prefer to rub against tree stumps and leave their scent information, etc.

Of course, this method of judgment based solely on behavioral characteristics will inevitably encounter some "unconventional" and "outliers". Just like the protagonist He Ye in this news, he has been active and active since he was a child. He likes to crawl around and shows many behavioral characteristics of male giant pandas, so his gender was misjudged. On the contrary, her father Mei Lan was treated as a "girl" because he was too quiet when he was young.

However, this kind of oolong usually only occurs in juvenile to sub-adult giant pandas. After entering the estrus period, the behavioral characteristics of male and female giant pandas will show more and more obvious differences. For example, male giant pandas prefer to urinate upside down against tree stumps to show their strength, and they also engage in more sniffing behaviors. This is why misunderstandings about the gender of giant pandas are often discovered when the giant pandas are adults or about to become adults.

Then the question comes again: Why don’t we seem to care much about their gender before they reach adulthood? The answer is actually very obvious: After all, for giant pandas in captivity, we will only consider finding spouses for them after they reach adulthood. It would be bad if we mess up the relationship like Meilan did. On a smaller scale, it's because living together for many years without pregnancy has lowered the overall fertility rate. On a larger scale, if two adult giant pandas in estrus are kept together, there will be a bloody incident of fighting and fighting, which will be very troublesome. .

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Why are some animals "distinct from male to female"?

In fact, with the exception of giant pandas, many carnivores and primates do not show overly obvious sexual characteristics when they are young. For example, the testicles of cats only descend into the scrotum with age; the coat color of white-cheeked gibbon babies will gradually change from grayish-yellow to black during development, and then the female's coat color will change back again when they reach sexual maturity. Golden. Therefore, it is actually common that the gender of young animals is difficult to visually identify, and it is nothing new.

There are also reasonable reasons for this phenomenon of hiding gender characteristics. In the life history of many social animals, adult individuals often engage in very fierce battles and show extremely strong aggression in order to compete for territory, status and mating rights. And this kind of fight is often strongly related to the gender of the individual.

Therefore, hiding one's sexual characteristics before sexual maturity can, to a certain extent, help reduce the aggression of other individuals of the same species towards oneself. Therefore, in the process of natural selection, those animals whose gender characteristics are not obvious before sexual maturity have more opportunities to survive in the struggle of the same kind and grow to maturity to reproduce offspring. The long-term evolution results in the gender of this animal. Characteristics are fully revealed after sexual maturity and mating conditions are reached.

The above-mentioned animals often show huge differences in the appearance characteristics of males and females, which is what we call "sexual dimorphism". Animals often need to consume a lot of energy to grow and maintain beautiful sexual characteristics, such as flowing manes, gorgeous tail feathers, sky-blue cheeks, etc. Therefore, in addition to declaring gender, showing that male individuals have a healthy and strong body is a sign of a suitable mating partner. It is also a weapon used to compare with the same sex and fight for the right to mate.

As for animals like giant pandas that usually live alone and rarely gather in groups during the mating season, they rarely need to compete for mating rights, and there is indeed no need to waste their long bodies. By using precious energy and deliberately evolving characteristics that can intuitively declare gender, the differences in appearance between the sexes will naturally become less obvious.

If you think about it carefully, it may be the same reason that our human babies have difficulty distinguishing between boys and girls, just like giant pandas have difficulty distinguishing between male and female, right?