A yellow-and-white penguin has been photographed for the first time ever
A wildlife photographer recently ran into a yellow penguin on an island in South Georgia (between Antarctica and the tip of South America).
As Belgian Yves Adams and his team unloaded their photography equipment, they noticed an odd bird emerge from a colony of about 120,000 black and white king penguins.
“One of the birds looked really strange, and when I looked closer it was yellow. We all went crazy when we realized. We dropped all the safety equipment and grabbed our cameras,” Adams told The Independent.
“I’d never seen or heard of a yellow penguin before.”
“We were so lucky the bird landed right where we were. Our view wasn’t blocked by a sea of massive animals. Normally it’s almost impossible to move on this beach because of them all.”
Adams believes the penguin was “leucistic,” which means its cells no longer create melanin, so its black feathers become a yellow and creamy color.
In 2012, a “white” chinstrap penguin was spotted in Antarctica, and a 1999 study documents leucism in about 1 in 120,000 Adelie penguins, but until now there have been no known photographs of them, especially none this clear:
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