Rare white seal spotted on camera for the first time!

A white southern elephant seal has been spotted on a sub-Antarctic beach.

It is the first confirmed sighting of such an animal

Details of the seal, which has creamy white fur but normal brown eyes and nose, have been published in the journal Polar Biology.

"It's quite something in a species which is well-known," says Ryan Reisinger of the University of Pretoria in South Africa, one of the researchers who discovered the animal on Marion Island.

For example, southern elephant seals from many colonies were hunted for decades within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In more recent times, scientists have also extensively studied the animals. "Yet this is the first confirmed case of leucism in the species," says Reisinger.

The white seal, a young female, is leucistic, rather than albinistic.

Albino animals lack pigment in just their eyes, or in their eyes, skin and hair, and they inherit the condition. Leucistic animals have little pigment and appear white all over, but with dark coloured eyes.

They estimate the animal was between one and two years old, and was likely born either on nearby Prince Edward Island or further afield on Iles Crozet.

Reisinger says it's impossible to say precisely how rare the animal is. "We can't put it in terms of one in a million, or one in a hundred thousand."