A wildlife photographer shared a picture of a yellow penguin that had “never been seen before.”
Belgian landscape and wildlife photographer Yves Adams found a king penguin with bright yellow feathers instead of the usual black ones.
All of this happened while he was in charge of a two-month photo trip in Antarctica and the South Atlantic.
The group stopped on a South Georgia island to take pictures of about 120,000 king penguins.
When he saw the strange picture, Adams was bringing food and safety gear to Salisbury Plain. A penguin with bright yellow feathers.
“I had never seen one or even heard of one. On that beach, there were 120,000 birds, but this was the only yellow one.”
The cameras were lucky that the penguin, which looked like it belonged in a tropical place, had just landed nearby on the beach. Because there were so many penguins and seals in the area, they had a clear view of it.
“It was a stroke of luck that the bird landed right where we were,” says the photographer. “A swarm of huge creatures wasn’t blocking our view. It’s almost impossible to move on this beach because of all of them.”
“The fact that he landed near us was a miracle. If this show had been 50 meters away, we would not have been able to see it.
Leucism, which makes the penguin’s feathers lose their colour, is to blame for its unique yellow colour. It is similar to albinism, but the animal keeps some of its colours.
Adams says, “It’s a leucistic penguin.” “Its black feathers have turned yellow and milky because its cells no longer make melanin.”
Scientists found that the yellow pigment in penguin feathers is a chemically unique compound that can’t be found in any other compound used to colour feathers.
“Penguins use the yellow colour to attract mates, and we think that the yellow chemical is made inside them,” says Daniel Thomas, a researcher at the Smithsonian Insider.
“It’s different from any of the five known types of bird feather colour, and it points to a new type of feather colour. So far as we know, the chemical is unlike any yellow pigments that penguins eat.
In this case, it’s unclear if the opposite sex likes or dislikes the yellow colour of the penguin.