The reported birth of a rare white buffalo in Yellowstone National Park fulfills a Lakota prophecy that portends better times, according to members of the American Indian tribe who cautioned that it’s also a signal that more must be done to protect the earth and its animals.
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00:00From what I've been able to gather through the various news reports, it looks like there was a
00:05white bison born typically. Wild buffalo are called bison. Oftentimes buffalo references
00:13domesticated animals. But a white bison calf was born out in Yellowstone. This is not a very common
00:20thing from most reports and a lot of the information out there. So it is a rare thing that people are
00:25very excited to see. American bison, this is a species that there's been a lot of work to
00:32restore them through the central plains. They came close to becoming extinct towards the early
00:371900s. There's two different ways or two different types of genetic mutations that will cause a
00:43bison to be white. I haven't seen enough photos or heard enough information on to determine if it
00:49was a leucistic bison or an albino bison. They're two different things. Both of them have to do
00:55with a lack of melatonin pigmentation in the animal, which comes from both parents. Typically,
01:02the parents are a normal color, in this case brown bison, but there is a lack of that
01:09pigmentation. You would see that more and whether it's in a zoological setting or even in a
01:13livestock setting, you could track it a little bit more. In the wild, oftentimes you never know.
01:20Sometimes an albino or leucistic animal, maybe not as much for bison, but some animals they
01:24become more vulnerable to predation and other things, so it's very difficult to track that in the wild.