“When that white figure appeared on the screen, I knew I was looking at something unique.” When on October 24, 2025, Ángel Hidalgo He posted this on his social media I couldn’t fathom what was about to happen. Hidalgo has been using cameras for years. phototrapping to document the fauna of the southern peninsula, but it was that photo (that of a supposed “albino lynx”) that became a boom.
They have rivers of ink flowed about the ‘white ghost of the Mediterranean forest’, but now Hidalgo has discovered something new: Satureja, the lynx in question, is no longer white.
What is happening here? Already in October of last year, Life Lynx-Connect explained that it was neither albinism, nor leucism, or anything like that. It was a reversible depigmentation of unknown (although probably environmental) origin.
In this sense, the fact that Satureja recovered pigmentation was something explainable (and, in fact, it is something that had already happened with another similar case). The really interesting thing is that, months later, we still don’t know why he had lost his color, nor why he has recovered it.
And we are not talking about just any animal, we are talking about a specimen of the crown jewel of world conservation.
And not because we don’t have clues… After all, we know how the lynx’s fur works: on the one hand, pheomelanin It is responsible for the brown, reddish and orange tones in the background; On the other hand, eumelamine is responsible for the dark spots on the ears, tail and other marked patterns. In the case of Satureja, what was failing was pheomelanin.
Furthermore, the two cases detected are closely linked to the Andalusian olive grove.
…but no one has managed to capture her. And, in that sense, the studies have only been based on photos and some ecosystem analysis. Nothing conclusive and certainly nothing that is sufficient to explain what is happening to Satureja.
The great paradox of the Iberian lynx. Underneath the dazzling success of the lynx’s recovery lies something that we do not always understand: yes, the lynx is returning, but it is returning to a deeply transformed territory. It is enough to understand that only 1.5% of the 570,000 hectares of the Andalusian olive grove They are grown organically, to understand that the world has changed a lot (and continues to change).
For this reason, many are beginning to talk about the lynx as the environmental sentinel of southern Spain. That is, as a species whose physiological changes tell us about changes in the environment. It is curious that we have been trying to save the Lynx for decades and right now, he is going to help us save ourselves from the main threats to the ecosystem.
Image | Alex Hidalgo
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