KISSIMMEE, Fla. — An extremely rare white leucistic alligator has been born at a Florida reptile park.
The 19.2-inch (49 cm) female slithered out of its shell and into the history books as one of only seven known leucistic alligators, Gatorland Orlando said Thursday. Three of the seven are at the park, officials there said.
“This is beyond rare. It is absolutely extraordinary,” Mark McHugh, president and CEO of Gatorland, said in a statement.
The park is asking for the public’s help in the naming the alligator, which is descended from a nest of leucistic alligators discovered in the swamps of Louisiana in 1987. The blue-eyed newborn is the first solid white alligator ever recorded to have descended from those original alligators, McHugh said.