In a similar discovery as one made off Mexico in 2011, fishermen in Indonesia were shocked when while cleaning an adult shark they found a rare baby albino shark with one eye in the middle of its head.
The commercial fishermen hauled in their nets in waters off Maluku Province in Indonesia on Oct. 10 and pulled in a dead adult shark, presumably bycatch as Yahoo! News Australia reported it was “accidentally caught in the net.”
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“We found three babies inside its stomach, but one of them looked strange with only one eye,” Andy, 29, explained, according to Yahoo! News. “Its color was strange, too, like milk.”
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The fishermen reported the “cyclops” baby shark to the local marine office and turned it over to officials there.
More from Yahoo! News Australia:
The baby shark had a condition called Cyclopia, a birth deformity that causes the embryo to form only one eye instead of two.
Its other condition, Albinism, forces the shark to produce low amounts of melanin, which is responsible for pigment in the body.
The discovery was remarkably similar to the cyclops baby shark found in an adult shark caught in waters southeast of La Paz, Mexico, in the summer of 2011. Some thought that it was a hoax, thinking the photo had been doctored. But it proved to be factual.
In that case, a mother bull shark was caught on a large hook baited with ballyhoo and tethered to a line beneath a fixed buoy, as reported by Pete Thomas Outdoors. The dead shark was pulled in by fishermen who later made the discovery while cleaning the fish. Fishermen found nine normal pups and the one-eyed albino pup.
Photo courtesy of Pisces Sportfishing.