Pink Dolphins?-Truth!
Summary of eRumor:
A forwarded email with pictures of what the message says is a rare pink dolphin.
The Truth:
The pictures and the story are true. As indicated in the eRumor, the original pictures were taken on June 17, 2007 by Captain Erik Rue of Calcasieu Charter Service, a company that does hunting and fishing charter trips in Louisiana.
The pictures were taken on Lake Calcesieu, an estuary north of the Gulf of Mexico in Southwestern Louisiana.
There is a species of what is called “pink dolphin” that lives in South America in the Amazon river. This sighting in Louisiana, however, is considered rare because it appears to be a bottlenose dolphin but pink ones are virtually never seen.
Marine Biologist Dagmar Ferti told ESPN that it was an albino calf and that bottlenose calves don’t have much blubber so the the blood circulating under the skin is more visible, especially if the calf had been working hard to swim. He said this sighting was only the third that he knows of in the Gulf of Mexico. There have been 13 total sightings dating back to 1962.
There is also a species of Humpback dolphin called the Indo-Pacific Humpback dolphin found mostly in Southeast Asia. Some of them have pink-colored skin because of blood vessels used for keeping the body temperature cool during exertion. One of them became a celebrity in Thailand and also a focus of controversy. The dolphin got caught in fishing nets during the summer of 2007 and ended up in a resort on the island of Samui in Southern Thailand. When reports surfaced that the dolphin was being trained to entertain tourists an outcry rose among animal rights activists. The government says the dolphin is scheduled to be rehabilitated and released back into the the gulf of Thailand by early 2008.