This giraffe is so rare that she might literally be one of a kind.
Omo is a white giraffe living in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park.
First spotted last year, the image above shows her alive and well just last week.
“She survived her first year as a small calf
which is the most dangerous time for a young giraffe due to lion, leopard and hyena preying on them,” ecologist and Wild Nature Institute
(WNI) founder Derek Lee told the Telegraph.
But Omo is not out of the woods yet.
“Her chances of surviving to adulthood are good but adult giraffes are regularly poached for bush meat, and her coloration might make her a target,” Lee told the paper.
Here she is last year:
In a blog post written last April, WNI explained that Omo isn’t an albino but rather leucistic, meaning some of her cells aren’t capable of making pigment.
“One way to tell the difference between albino and leucistic animals is that albino individuals lack melanin everywhere, including in the eyes, so the resulting eye color is red from the underlying blood vessels,” the organization wrote.
“Omo is the only pale giraffe we are currently aware of,” Lee told the Telegraph. “But we have also observed leucistic waterbuck, Cape buffalo and ostrich in Tarangire.”
In a blog post last week, WNI said Omo was named by a local guide after a popular brand of detergent