About 3 kilometers off Kanaga Volcano in Alaska's Aleutian Islands, US scientists have spotted an extremely rare white killer whale. The whale was spotted last month by crew aboard the Oscar Dyson, a research ship conducting an acoustic survey of Pollock, a whitefish, near Stellar sea lion haul-out sites.
It appeared to be a healthy, adult male about 7 to 9 meters long and weighing as much as 10,000 pounds. The whale's saddle area was white, but since other parts of its body had a yellowish/brownish color, it may not have been a true albino.
"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."
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