This giraffe has been slowly losing its colour for 6 years
Por: Guillermo T.
07 de Julho de 2016

This giraffe has been slowly losing its colour for 6 years

Inglês

Scientists have been documenting the incredibly rare case of a giraffe that’s turning white with age. Although there have been several reports of albino orleucistic giraffes that are born without pigment, this is the first time that scientists have witnessed a change in colouration quite like this in giraffes.

It all started in 2009, when biologist Zoe Muller from the University of Bristol in the UK began observing a male giraffe in the Soysambu Conservancy of Kenya. After taking over 430 photographs of him, Muller noticed something changing.

"I first started to see a few white spots appear on the animal’s coat back in November 2009, and was puzzled as I had never seen this before," she told Karl Gruber from New Scientist.

But the white patches didn’t stop there. Between 2009 and 2016, the giraffe went from mostly normal colours to his entire top half - including his long neck - going white.

How? Well he might have a rare skin disease called vitiligo, where the skin slowly loses pigment – the same disease that Michael Jackson was diagnosed with.

"There have been a few reports of white giraffes before in the wild, but those animals are either albino or leucistic, which means they are born white and have been that way for their entire life," Muller told New Scientist. "There has never been a documented case of a giraffe turning white over time."

Unfortunately, the colour of giraffes are pretty important for them out in the wild.

"The biological functions of animal coat patterns include protecting the skin from exposure to sunlight, protection from predators by camouflage, individual recognition and sexual recognition within a species," Muller wrote in a paper about the giraffe, published in the African Journal of Ecology.

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