Among thousands of white-bellied, golden-necked penguins, one seemed dressed in mourning.
Yves Adams, a wildlife photographer from Belgium, spotted it at St Andrews Bay on South Georgia Island, in the middle of the South Atlantic. A colleague had told him there was a strange bird in the colony. When he finally saw it up close, he understood why: while every other king penguin has a white belly and yellow feathers on its neck, this one was black from head to toe.
There’s a name for the explanation: melanism. It is a pigmentation condition associated with an excessive production of melanin, the pigment responsible for dark coloration. According to IFLScience, partial melanism in penguins could occur in 1 out of 250.000 individuals, and a completely black version would be even rarer. Ornithologist Allan Baker, of the University of Toronto, has explained that melanic birds usually retain at least a few white patches.
Up close, Adams said, the black has a metallic green sheen on the neck and belly. And most striking of all: the rest of the colony accepted it completely normally, with no rejection and no difference in size.
It’s the second unusual penguin to cross Adams’s lens: he had already photographed a yellow one. For him, seeing a black one was like finding a ghost with feathers.