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A white killer whale—fin pictured here— was recently spotted in Alaska's Aleutian Islands, sending researchers and their ship's crew scrambling for cameras.

"I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it," said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. "It was quite neat to find it."

The whale was spotted last month while scientists aboard the Oscar Dyson—a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research ship—were conducting an acoustic survey of Pollock, a whitefish, near Steller sea lion haul-out sites.

"This is the first time we came across a white killer whale," agreed John Durban, a research biologist at NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.