Photographer Yves Adams traveled to South Georgia in December 2019 for a two-month shooting adventure, but he didn't have to wait long to get the shot of a lifetime. Adams grabbed his camera as he noticed penguins swimming toward the shore while unpacking safety gear.
Adams tells Jane Dalton for the Independent, "One of the birds appeared particularly weird, and when I looked closer, it was yellow. "When we discovered it, we all lost our minds. We set down the safety gear and picked up our cameras."
According to Yasemin Saplakoglu of Live Science, the unusual yellow-colored penguin was one of 120,000 king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) living in a colony on the remote South Georgia Island.
King penguins typically have feathers in both black and white with a little yellow tinge down their necks, giving them their distinctive tuxedo appearance. The yellow penguin has a bright coat rather than a melanin-free body. Leucism, a condition where melanin is only partially eliminated and some portions of the penguin's body retain color, is what Adams attributed the strange colour to, according to Live Science. Leucism can damage a penguin's complete plumage or just a few of its feathers.
Researchers are fascinated by the penguin's yellow plumage, and many have argued over what created the peculiar colour. According to Dee Boersma, a conservation biologist who was not involved in the expedition but concurs with Adams, the penguin is most likely leucistic and not albino because it lacks some colour. Kevin McGraw, an integrated behavioral ecologist at Arizona State University who was also not on the expedition, disagrees and claims that more examination of the penguin's feathers is required in order to be certain.
"It does look albino from the perspective that it lacks all melanin. We'd need feather samples for biochemical testing if we aimed to unequivocally document," McGraw tells to Live Science.