Global Courant
Dylan Golden spent the morning of June 28 Guerrilla Bay in Australia with his drone. After about two hours of photographing whales in the area, he was ready to go home when he saw a splash.
The photographer sent out his drone to investigate — and he was shocked by what he found, he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Golden saw what he thought was a “very rare”. young white humpback whale swimming alongside an adult humpback whale, he wrote in an Instagram post. He was able to snap a photo and a short video of the two creatures swimming through the bay.
“I was shocked. I didn’t know how to react or really believe it was one until I looked back at the footage and saw how white it was,” Golden told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “I was impressed. “
Gold has been photograph whale migration since he was 14 years old, he told The Guardian. This is the first time he sees a white whale.
“It was really cool to watch,” he said. “I’ve just never seen anything like it before.”
Guerilla Bay is located on Australia’s southeast coast, about 300 kilometers south of Sydney.
White humpback whales in Australia
Golden’s discovery comes just weeks after a tourist flew over the Great Barrier Reef caught an all-white whale on camera. The sighting was confirmed by the White Whale Research Center in a June 16 post.
White whales are a rarity and there are only a handful in the world, Vanessa Pirotta, a whale expert at Macquarie University, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Off the east coast of Australia there is only one known white whale, Migaloo.
Migaloo was last seen in 2020 and experts couldn’t confirm if he was the June 16 sighting.
“It doesn’t give us the amount of information we would need to identify Migaloo,” Pirotta told 9 News. “It could be him or possibly another whitish whale as part of this Eastern Australian humpback whale population.”
Similarly, experts have been unable to confirm whether Golden’s sighting was really a white humpback whale.
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Olaf Meynecke, a marine scientist from Griffith University, speculated that the whale was only a few days old and therefore appeared white, he told The Guardian.
Oceania Project founder Wally Franklin said it’s worth investigating the whale, but the sighting itself isn’t conclusive evidence of another all-white humpback, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“It’s very hard to explain it as an albino whale, but I’d like to see more information on it,” Franklin told the outlet.
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