Rare White Elephant Seal Photographed
Editor's Note-
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It is the first confirmed sighting of such an animal.
Eared seals, which include sea lions and fur seals are more usually seen sporting unusual colours, but not true seals, a group which includes elephant seals.
Details of the seal, which has creamy white fur but normal brown eyes and nose, have been published in the journal Polar Biology.
"It's quite something in a species which is well-known," says Ryan Reisinger of the University of Pretoria in South Africa, one of the researchers who discovered the animal on Marion Island.
For example, southern elephant seals from many colonies were hunted for decades within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In more recent times, scientists have also extensively studied the animals. "Yet this is the first confirmed case of leucism in the species," says Reisinger.
The white seal, a young female, is leucistic, rather than albinistic.
