Anchorage Daily News

A white killer whale spotted in Alaska's Aleutian Islands sent researchers and their ship's crew scrambling for their cameras.The nearly mythic whale was real after all.

"I had heard about this whale but we had never been able to find it," said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. "It was quite neat to find it."

The orca had been spotted once years ago in the Aleutians but had eluded researchers since, even though they had seen many of the more classic black and white orcas over the years.

Fearnbach said the white orca stood out.

"When you first looked at it, it was very white," she said today.

More observation showed that while the orca's saddle area was white, other parts of its body had some pigmentation, a subtle yellowish or brownish color, indicating it is not a true albino.

It probably is not a true albino given the subtle coloration, said John Durban, a research biologist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. That's probably a good thing. True albinos usually don't live long and can have health problems.

Durban said white killer whales have been spotted twice before: in 1993 in the northern Bering Sea around St. Lawrence Island and in 2001 near Adak in the central Aleutians. There also have been sightings along the Russian coast.

While Alaska researchers have documented thousands of black-and-white killer whales in the Bering Sea and the Aleutians during the summer surveys over the past seven years, this was something new and exciting, Durban said.

"This is the first time we came across a white killer whale," he said.

The killer whale was spotted in February while scientists aboard the Oscar Dyson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship, were conducting an acoustic survey of pollock near Steller sea lion haulout sites in the Aleutian Islands.

There are two types of killer whales: fish eaters and marine mammal eaters. The killer whales the researchers spotted were fish eaters.

The scientists observed several pods over a two-week period. The white killer whale was in a family group of 12 on a day when the seas were fairly rough. It was spotted about 2 miles off Kanaga Volcano on Feb. 23.

The ship stayed with the animal for about 30 minutes.

"Nobody had ever seen anything like that before. Everybody actually came out and was taking pictures. It was a neat sighting for everybody," Fearnbach said.

The orca appeared to be a healthy, adult male about 25 to 30 feet long and weighing upward of 10,000 pounds.

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