Albino Gorilla, Snowflake, Was Inbred: Only Known Case Likely Due To Habitat Loss, New Research

New research shows that Snowflake, a famous albino gorilla, was inbred. The gorilla lived for 40 years at the Barcelona Zoo.

Snowflake got his white coloring by way of inbreeding-but he was born in the wild, not captivity. Snowflake was captured in 1966 by villagers in Equatorial Guinea. He died of skin cancer in 2003 at the Barcelona zoo.

Snowflake, a male Western lowland gorilla, was the only known white gorilla in the world. And now, new research explains why. His entire genome has been sequenced, and the results reveal that Snowflake may have been the offspring of a niece and an uncle.

Researchers used frozen blood to sequence Snowflake's genome, and compared it with those of humans and nonalbino gorillas. In humans, there are four genetic mutations that cause albinism. Albinism is a characterized by an absence of skin, hair, and eye pigment; it causes higher risk of vision problems and skin cancer due to the missing pigment.

Skin cancer is just what Snowflake died of.

And researchers at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva at the University of Pompeu Fabra now think it's due to a single mutant gene, SLC45A2, which Snowflake inherited from both parents. It has previously been linked to albinism in other species.

This, they found, was due to inbreeding. The percentage of genes in Snowflake's mother and father that matched, 12%, indicates that an uncle and niece mated. This, too, is unusual - it's the first report of inbreeding in Western lowland gorillas.

Reserachers think it may be because of shrinking populations and habitat loss. Because gorillas cannot disperse from family and populations are reduced, they turn to family to mate.

"If we are reducing much more the space that they have now, it is more likely that they will be forced to stay in the group and that will increase the consanguinity," or shared blood, researcher Tomas Marques-Bonet said.

Next, the researchers will sequence genomes of wild-born chimpanzees and gorillas in order to understand how much genetic variation is in the wild ape population. They'll then compare it to genetic variation in humans.