CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — The red panda cub that caught keepers at the Chattanooga Zoo off guard this summer is a girl, the zoo announced at a public gender reveal for the youngster named Masala.
Two visitors pulled from the crowd helped with the reveal, which used a canvas marked with paw prints and a bottle of paint whose color stayed hidden until the moment came. The party also offered trading cards and stations where guests could learn about red pandas, an endangered species and one of the zoo’s biggest draws.
Masala is now close to 4 months old. Her mother, 5-year-old Saffron, delivered her on July 6, even though a series of X-rays had never shown a pregnancy. Zoo staff later traced the hidden pregnancy to delayed implantation, a process in which an early embryo stays dormant for a time before it implants and begins to develop.
Keepers had watched Saffron and Avi mate in February. Suspicion grew in mid-June, when Saffron gained weight and refused to take part in her X-ray, and a keeper checking the habitat camera around 11 p.m. one night spotted the newborn.
The cub weighed roughly 4 ounces at birth and has since topped 2 pounds. Her father, Avi, died in April, months before she was born.
With Masala, the zoo now cares for three red pandas, all of them female. She will stay with Saffron for at least a year. Where she lives after that will be guided by the Species Survival Plan, which works to keep the captive red panda population healthy, and keepers are spending the meantime building trust with her and training behaviors that make her care easier.
The cub lives with her mother in the Himalayan Passage habitat. On days she naps out of sight, a camera inside the nest box streams her live for zoo fans.
