Eight More Oddly Colored Creatures

Orange crocodiles, green bees, and yellow lobsters -- oh my! Every now and then nature throws us for a loop by producing animals in colors we don't quite expect. If you missed it, catch the first installment here.

1. White Monarch Butterflies

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White Monarch Butterflies are a naturally occurring, but rare variant of the standard orange Monarch. This color appears in roughly 1% of the Monarch population.

2. Purple Corn Snakes

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Corn snakes are normally red with orange saddle marks, but there are a variety of corn snake color morphs ranging from fluorescent orange to purple.

3. Green Sloths

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Sloths sometimes appear to be green because their fur is an ideal environment for blue-green algae. Unlike most fur-bearing animals, sloths' fur will absorb water, which encourages algae to grow and impart a green hue. Click here to read more about a Finnish study on the symbiotic relationship between sloths and algae.

4. Yellow Lobsters

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Denny Ingram, pictured above, caught this yellow lobster in Newport, Rhode Island. Approximately 1 in every 30 million lobsters is yellow.

5. Blue Tree Frogs

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Hyla meridionalis, the Mediterranean Tree Frog, and Hyla aborea, the European Tree Frog, are normally bright green. But every once and a while a blue specimen, like the Mediterranean Tree Frog shown above, is born.

6. Orange Crocodiles

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In late 2011, Snappy the crocodile surprised his handlers by suddenly turning orange. The reptile experts at the Roaming Reptiles Park in Australia attributed the change to a broken filter; Snappy had attacked it prior to his dramatic color change, and handlers suspected that iron or tannins in the water were responsible. No harm came to Snappy after he turned orange. Coincidentally, an orange alligator was sighted earlier in 2011.

7. Pink African Grey Parrots

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Pink patches in African Greys (which, as you might guess, are normally grey) began as a naturally occurring color morph. Over the years, breeders ended up with 100% pink specimens. The first all-pink Greys sold for over $150,000.

8. Metallic Green Bees

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When we think bees, we think yellow and black stripes. But in reality, bees come in a variety of colors, including red, blue, and green. Bees in the genus Agapostemon are not only green, but shiny. If you can stand the joke: green sweat bees are the shiny Pokémon of the bee world.