While most of us are familiar with albinos, or those with a
condition wherein there’s a lack of melanin production causing
an absence of pigment, there is also such a thing as melanism.
The black panther is actually a leopard with this
characteristic, but what about other members of the animal
kingdom? Black deer? In my woodlands? It’s actually LESS likely
than you think. According to Dr. John Baccus, director of the
wildlife ecology program at Texas State University, “Even though
we have more melanistic deer here than in the whole world,
they’re still extremely rare. It’s the rarest of the white-
tailed deer, even rarer than the big-antlered deer. I get the
harvest records every year from the Texas Parks and Wildlife
Department, and generally, there are fewer than five of these
melanistic deer that are harvested in any given year.”
Melanistic zebras aren’t all-black, though on occasion they come
close. Instead, the mutation acts on the width of the black
stripes, crowding out the white to varying degrees. Som