Photos of a pink dolphin sighting have gone viral online, but don't be fooled by its rosy appearance – it's not the real deal.
A June 18 Facebook post included a photo of the brightly colored aquatic mammal and said a “rare pink dolphin” had been spotted off the coast of North Carolina.
Similar photos of what appears to be a pink dolphin were also posted to Facebook, and were flagged as part of Meta's efforts to combat fake news and misinformation on News Feed. (Read more about Facebook's partnership with Meta, which owns Instagram, here.)
Some dolphins are known to be pink or pinkish in color, but the dolphins in these photos are not real.
A spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Marine Fisheries told PolitiFact that there have been no confirmed sightings of pink dolphins in North Carolina waters.
We also could not find any credible news reports about pink dolphins off the coast of North Carolina.
Experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Southeast Fisheries Regional Office reviewed the photos and found they had been altered with software, a NOAA spokesperson told PolitiFact.
The photos appear to have originated from a Facebook page called “Outer Banks Vibes,” which frequently posts digitally altered photos. The page first shared photos of the pink dolphins on June 18, and more the following day. Both posts have been shared more than 80,000 times.
“Pink dolphins” do exist, but they don't look like the ones in these photos. The Amazonian river dolphin, also known as the pink river dolphin, lives only in the freshwater rivers of South America, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Formosan humpback whales, which live off the west coast of Taiwan, can be white or pinkish in color as adults, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
The Amazon river dolphin and the Formosan humpback whale have characteristics that distinguish them from the fake pink dolphin seen in the photo, such as different nose lengths and body sizes.
In rare cases, dolphins can suffer from albino, a genetic condition that causes them to lack melanin. According to the Blue World Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to marine research, education and conservation, albino dolphins appear pink or white instead of the usual black or gray.
In 2023, news outlets reported that two pink dolphins were spotted off the coast of Louisiana. One of the dolphins is believed to be “Pinky,” a legendary local albino bottlenose dolphin first photographed in 2007.
We rate the claim that a photo shows a pink dolphin off the coast of North Carolina as FALSE.
