If you want to feast your eyes on some interesting great white sharks, then Australia is the place to be right now!
Just after last week’s sighting of what’s believed to be one of the largest great white sharks ever photographed, right off of the coast of Australia, yet another sighting of a great white shark oddity has been confirmed.
What appears to be an albino great white shark pup has just washed up on the shores of an Australian beach. The great white shark is relatively small, and as shown in the photos taken by Facebook user Luke Anslow of New South Whales, the shark is colorless and lacks many types of pigmentation, which actually means that instead of being albino, it’s leucistic.
It seems people are interested in the shark. It is Leucistic not Albino and i am not aware of another like it being found beforeRyan Chatfield Troy Reilly CJ Anslow Rochelle Brooks Morgan Anslow Tracey Lentell
Posted by Luke Anslow on Wednesday, January 20, 2016
"From the pictures I've seen online I'm confident it's a white shark, but I understand the confusion," said John Crisholm, a biologist with the Massachusetts shark research program. "Juvenile white sharks are very similar in appearance to porbeagles. The easy way to tell the difference is the porbeagle has a secondary caudal keel and the white does not.”
How rare is a sighting like this? – As Earth Touch News reports, the last time that anything close to an albino shark was sighted, it was in 2000 off of the coast of Texas, and it was a blacktip shark; not even a great white shark.
The local fishery department came to the rescue when Anslow reported the colorless shark had washed up. It is said that the shark was “thrashing” around in shallow waters before it ended up on land, and now researchers hope to preserve the specimen, which unfortunately passed away from his beaching, to learn more about it.
Source: Luke Anslow via Earth Touch News