(The story by Sanjib Chaudhary originally appeared on Global Voices on August 8, 2020)
After news of the existence of a yellow turtle in India's eastern state of Odisha went viral this past July, Nepalis wanted to remind the world that they made a similar discovery first — on April 14, 2018, to be exact — when a rare, golden turtle — but a different species — was found for the first time in southeastern Nepal’s Dhanushadham municipality.
According to a research paper by Kamal Devkota, Dev Narayan Mandal and Hinrich Kaiser, which was published in the journal Herpetology Notes, the turtle was released into its natural habitat after pictures were taken as proof.
A normal Indian flapshell turtle is greenish-grey in colour, with yellow marks on its head and neck.
It has a grey carapace dotted with dark yellow spots and derives its name from the femoral flaps at the plastron, the ventral part of the shell.
These turtles are found in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, most typically in ditches, lakes, ponds, and paddy fields with stagnant water.
Omnivorous in nature, they eat anything from leaves and flowers to snails, fish, and frogs.
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While a normal-coloured flapshell turtle can easily camouflage itself in the murky, greenish water, its golden-coloured variant — a turtle with chromatic leucism — is easily recognisable and therefore more vulnerable.
Its luminous golden colour, in particular, makes it a prized pet.
The congenital disorder of albinism creates a complete absence of pigmentation in the skin, hair, and eyes due to the lack of tyrosinase, an enzyme involved in the production of melanin.
Researchers estimate that albinism occurs once in every 10,000 mammal births. Leucism, on the other hand, is an extremely rare genetic condition in which animals have reduced pigmentation.