When volunteers set out to survey a turtle nest on Australia's Sunshine Coast recently, they were convinced all the hatchlings had left home days ago. But it turned out one tiny straggler remained: a "pink-eyed, snow white" baby turtle lying on its back at the bottom of the nest.
The five-centimetre turtle was discovered by a team from the environmental volunteer group Coolum and North Shore Coast Care, who had been digging up the nest in order to count its empty egg shells for research purposes. The other hatchlings headed for the sea two days before, so the unusual discovery took the volunteers by surprise.
"[This is] the first ever albino green turtle we have come across in our nine years of turtle monitoring," says the team in a Facebook update.
Albino hatchlings are indeed a rare find, occurring at a rate of "one in many hundreds of thousands" of eggs, the chief scientist for the Queensland government's Threatened Species Unit, Dr Col Limpus, tells ABC News.
Rare as they might be, similarly colourless specimens made an appearance on Mozambique's Vamizi Island just last year, when researchers dug out not one, but four albino turtles stuck in a nest. Sadly, only two of them survived.
The Australian hatchling was luckier, scampering across the dunes towards the [relative] safety of the ocean – but that's just the start of the tough journey that lies ahead. Only a tiny percentage of green sea turtles make it to adulthood, and this pale survivor's unusual colouring will make it especially vulnerable to predators.
"Normally they don't survive coming out of the nest, and when they do, they're abnormal and not well suited to the environment, which means the chance of survival is very slim," explains Limpus, who has never seen reports of a mature albino turtle coming ashore to nest anywhere in the world.
Added to this are all the other threats endangered green turtles face in the wild, including habitat loss, harvesting of eggs, damage to nesting beaches and entanglement in fishing gear.
The odds might be stacked against it, but its rescuers are hoping its luck holds out. "May the oceans be kind to this unique little green turtle," says the group.
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Top header image: Michael Sale, Flickr
Conservation
Oceans
Discoveries
