The bottlenose dolphins we know, love, and celebrate on April 14, National Dolphin Day, are gray - presumably because that's the color thousands of years of evolution has proved best for them so far.
But one bottlenose dolphin captured and kept by the Taiji Whale Museum in Japan doesn't have any pigment in its entire body. It's an albino.
It looks pure white in the picture above, but its skin actually appears pink, which you can see in the picture of it swimming beside a normal-colored dolphin below.
Albinism occurs when an animal completely lacks melanin, the compound that gives the skin and eyes color. The dolphin at Taiji is only the 14th abnormally pale bottlenose dolphin people have seen (there's a species of pink dolphin that lives in the Amazon), and believed to be the 2nd true albino dolphin raised in an aquarium.
The dolphin was captured off the coast of Japan on January 18, 2014, during a yearly dolphin hunt in Taiji made notorious by the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary "The Cove," which shows fishermen herding dolphins into a cove either to be captured for aquarium display or killed for meat.
Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, which includes Taiji, reported that 1,218 dolphins and small whales were captured there in 2011, though it didn't specify how many of those captured were killed.
In 2014 environmental activists filed a lawsuit against the Taiji Whaling Museum, saying the museum had not allowed outside experts to come check on the albino dolphin.
Researchers from the Taiji Whaling Museum say the dolphin's health has been monitored "properly" through observing behavior and periodic blood tests. The museum, along with the Tokyo University of Marine
We're hoping it's healthy. It's no surprise the pink dolphin captured the attention of so many with its rare and dashing good looks.