Rare Zebra Foal With Black Spots Caught On Film

We all know that zebras are black and white and striped. However, sometimes nature throws in a curveball.

One professional photographer, Antony Tira, managed to capture a very rare sight: a none-striped zebra!

The little zebra was actually a foal, but it didn’t have stripes at all on its body. Tira was filming video and taking pictures of the wildlife at the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya, when he spotted the rare animal.

Tira was quite surprised by what he was witnessing, never thinking that such a zebra could exist. In fact, at first he didn’t even believe that he was looking at a baby zebra but rather some other species of animal that had ended up getting lost from its family.

However, it was, indeed,a zebra. In fact, the rare little foal turned out to be what is known as a “blacker zebra.”

As shared by Abdelrahman Hassanein, the blacker zebra foal – at the time of the photography – was no more than a week old. It had been born with a case of melanism, which is the opposite disorder of albinism. Rather than having light-colored pigmentation, the zebra’s fur only had dark colors.

While that might not seem like a big deal, a zebra’s stripes are actually quite important to its well-being.

In fact, their stripes serve as a means of keeping them cool while they’re running across the African landscape. Additionally, zebra’s stripes help them to better digest their food.

A zebra’s digestion is supposedly less efficient than other animals, and so by having a good body cooling system, they’re able to digest their food and thus they’re able to remain healthy.

Because the blacker zebra foal doesn’t have any of these cooling stripes, it is a sad reality that many blacker zebras don’t live long in the wild. It has been observed that blacker zebras born in the wild will normally only live about six weeks after their birth.

At the time that the foal was photographed, it was only a week old, meaning that it probably only had a few weeks left to live. While it is unknown what happened to the little zebra foal, we can only hope that it beat the odds and found a way to survive.

Check out the video below:

What do you think of the blacker zebra’s coat? Let us know!