Natuarally occuring albinos do occur and exist. Especially in populations that are located in a small isolated geograhic area such as one pile of rocks or shoreline in an African lake.
All it would have taken is one albino to survive long enough and produce fry in the wild and you would have a multitude of normal appearing animals that carry the albino gene.
If you breed two of these normal appearing heterozygous animals together and you will produce approx 25% albino fry. This is again theoretical and the 4 albino fry out of 37 would be indicative of 2 normal colored albino gene carriers producing.
Additionally if these heterozgous animals are breeding with normal colored non gene carriers in the wild half of those offspring will carry the albino gene as well yet they do not express it. So theoreatically a large percentage of small isolated wild population can be albino gene carriers without anybody knowing. Someone lucks out and receives 2 wild fish from that population breeds them and you have your albinos.
In the reptile hobby wildcaught albino pythons and boas are rare but suprisingly quite a few are found in the wild every year and many of these animals have survived to adulthood in the wild even though they have been handicapped by the albino coloration.
Albinos do occur naturally in every population with suprising regularity and many do survive to reproduce.
Dan
