Chunkymunky wrote:Was interested to hear they have found black squirrels recently!
If you're talking about the ones in the UK - mainly around Letchworth - these are actually the same species as the grey squirrel. In the same way that you have albino individuals that have no pigment, and are white, you can also get melanistic individuals that are black. There are few advantages to being albino, as a squirrel, and so these are typically lost from the population and do poorly in terms of passing their genes on to the nexr generation - whereas there is some evidence that black melanistic squirrels do have certain advantages, and so this trait is starting to spread.
