COLLEGE STATION, Texas – It is time to play the lottery for a lucky College Station man.
Rudolfo Garza III recently had a run-in with some “trash pandas” that were enjoying a nice meal in a dumpster behind a local car dealership. You may be wondering what’s so lucky about finding raccoons dumpster diving. Isn’t that where you should find them?
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Well, one of the raccoons was all white or albino to be precise. According to Texas Parks and Wildlife, the odds of a raccoon having albinism (completely white, red eyes, etc.) is 1 in 20,000 and the odds of seeing one in the wild could be 1 in 750,000. These odds are due in part to survivability. White really does stand out to predators.
Some readers may be wondering how albinism occurs. According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife website, an albino is born without the ability to produce color pigment in its skin, hair, feathers, scales, or eyes. As a result, its hair, feathers, or scales range from snowy white to an off-white straw color. Any exposed skin usually has a pinkish look from the network of blood vessels visible through the transparent skin tissue.
With the exception of its white coloration, the albino resembles normal members of its species in all respects. When it is natural for members of the species to be white, the true albino can be distinguished by its pink or red eyes. This distinctive eye color is caused by the blood in the tiny vessels of the iris showing through the transparent parts. (In a normal eye, the colored iris hides these blood vessels).
Now, we have established the rarity of these curious creatures, but even more amazing is that this is not the first time this year that one of these unique animals was spotted in Texas. Two of them were spotted hanging out with some buddies in Van Zandt County back in mid-June. Yes, that’s right, two of them at the same time. This is so rare that Texas Parks and Wildlife had this to say, “We promise everyone that we didn’t spray paint any animals in the formation of this photo”.
We wondered what happened to the albino trash panda and his dumpster buddies in College Station, so we reached out to the man that found them and took the pictures for an update. Garza told us that some nice folks at the car dealership were able to coax the bandits out of the dumpster, and they ran off into the nearby woods unharmed. When asked about what he thought about the ordeal, he agreed that it was time to try his luck at the lottery.