Seeing pictures about albino animals isn't too rare nowadays, but I find that melanistic animals are even rarer.
Melanism is the complete opposite of albinism. While albino animals are completely white, melanistic ones are completely black. I'm not going to show you how this works on humans - it's not pretty - but I find melanistic animals a lot more interesting than the albino ones.
For example a black panther is actually a leopard suffering from melanism:
Do you remember Bagheera, from The Jungle Book? He is actually an Indian, melanistic leopard.
How many times did you see foxes? I assume you DO know what a fox looks like (if nothing else, you probably saw one in cartoons), but I'll post a pic of them here anyways.
Since I saw wild foxes back when I was a kid and camping around in forests, I was quite used to their looks. This way, it kinda surprised me to see a totally black one's picture going around the internet.
This particular fox is apparently spotted in Britain, sulking around in a graveyard. The next picture is of a silver fox (that is actually the name of the melanistic red foxes, and their colors, as their name says, can vary from silver to totally black, with a white spot on their tale.)
Isn't it cute?
Sooo, what about other animals?Let's see... how about deer?
I guess at some point it was considered a cool hobby to go out and kill a bunch of deer just for fun, but I wonder now if they would do that with these unusual ones too. I don't believe that I would have had the heart to eat them, especially because when I was a kid, I actually knew a family that had a fawn as a pet around the house.
And talking about pets... melanism isn't only for mammals.
A lot of different kinds of fishes can suffer from this, but I guess the clownfish is the most spectacular. Now, how fun would it be if Finding Nemo 2 would have a black fish.
How about birds?
Here's a melanistic penguin, sadly lacking a tuxedo:
Here is a pretty melanistic owl:
I think blending in once the night comes is even easier for him.
