Photo courtesy of The Guardian

Not sheer pink or light pink or blush pink or coral, but really pink — bubble gum  pink, cotton candy pink, Barbie high heels pink — a pink so pink it looks fake.

This pink dolphin has been photographed by charter boat Captain Erik Rue, 42, who has been studying the dolphin since it first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in south-west Louisiana. Rue originally saw the rare albino dolphin, which also has reddish eyes, swimming with a pod of four other dolphins.

The Guardian reports:

A rare pink bottlenose dolphin has been spotted in a Louisiana lake. The albino dolphin has been making a splash with locals and visitors to the area since it was first spotted last year.

"I just happened to see a little pod of dolphins, and I noticed one that was a little lighter ... I had never seen anything like it. It's the same colour throughout the whole body," said Rue.

"The dolphin appears to be healthy and normal other than its coloration, which is quite beautiful and stunningly pink," Rue said he had seen the dolphin 40 to 50 times.

"As time has passed the young mammal has grown and sometimes ventures away from its mother to feed and play but always remains in the vicinity of the pod," he said

Regina Asmutis-Silvia, a senior biologist with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, said: "I have never seen a dolphin coloured in this way in all my career."

"It is a truly beautiful dolphin but people should be careful, as with any dolphins, to respect it - observe from a distance, limit their time watching, don't chase or harass it."

Read the entire article here.

Tidal Wave
Annette Marie Hyder
Previously published in The Cayuse Press

Love was a goddess
a body of water
large and salty and brown.

Her surface puckered
dimpled and moved
in synchrony
with your hands.

She transfixed you
with her trident
and tsunami strength.

That she was brown,
muddy, from all of her
vast experience
her churned up depths
made you long
for muddiness too.

Warned
of her sucking whirlpools
and teeth like rocks,
her entangling seaweed hair
you hurled yourself
in a dolphin's
or porpoise's
perfect arching dive.

The fear
that you could drown —
a feathered lure —
ticked your fancy.

Your only wish
to be buried at sea.