A rare sighting of an albino or “pink” dolphin was reported off the coast of Dana Point Sunday, giving spectators aboard a charter boat run by Capt. Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari a treat.
Capt. Dave Anderson said he has only seen the albino dolphin once before during his years at sea, but this is the first time he’s ever been able to capture it on camera.
“We’ve never been able to get close to it until yesterday,” he said. “It got close up to the boat and was riding with us.”
In most cases, common dolphins are a sleek gray color. Anderson thinks this albino dolphin is the same one he saw before, in a group of about 500 common dolphins that swam alongside the boat.
There are about 400,000 common dolphins along the coast here, Anderson said.
“We just never see this, it’s just a rare and unusual sighting,” he said.
His 6-year-old daughter Arielle named the dolphin “Casper.”
Among the passengers were 14 students from around the USA as well as Italy, Sweden, Great Britain, Spain, and Scotland, who were attending a summer course on Spinal Cord Injury Research hosted by the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at the UC Irvine.
Check out this video footage taken by passenger Sheri Lowry.
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Not much is known about the albino common dolphin, but Anderson thinks the same genetics that happen with human albinos also occur in the dolphins.
A similar dolphin spotted in Louisiana last year made huge nationwide news, with photos of the pink-eyed, pink-skinned mammal circulated widely on the Internet. Read the story here.
Anderson said this one was with a calf. Also on the trip, the charter boat spotted a blue whale, two fin whales, and a pair of Risso dolphins.
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