ANTARTICAL ACCIDENTAL – AN ALL - WHITE PENGUIN

“We thought it was a lump of snow,” recalls Gerald Kooyman, a biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He and his son, Carsten, were counting chicks, nearly 20000 of them, in an emperor penguin colony near Cape Washington in December 1996. But the lump moved – it was a young penguin. Only its brown eyes were a normal color. (True albinos, which cannot produce any pigment, apepeart to have pink eyes.) With its shimmering coat, how will this penguin fare against predatory leopard seals? “When it’s swimming near ice, it may be camouflaged,” says Kooyman. “But if a seal sees it from above, with contrasting dark water below it, it’s a risk.”