Onlookers have been stunned at the sight of an albino green turtle discovered on Sunshine Coast’s Castaways Beach this week.

The tiny baby turtle, about five centimetres across, was found by environmental volunteer group Coolum and North Shore Coast Care.

President Linda Warneminde said she was shocked at the “pink-eyed, snow white” turtle left in what she thought was an empty nest.

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“It looked like a normal turtle hatchling, except that it had a white shell, and it had little white flippers, and you could see a little bit of pink under its flippers,” she said.

“None of us had ever experienced, or seen anything like that before, so we were all a little bit taken back.”

Ms Warneminde and a number of other volunteers were surveying the nest, which had already hatched two days earlier, when they uncovered the little white hatchling lying on its back.

“On Friday we had a green turtle nest that was laid at Castaways Beach,” she said.

“Two days later we went to go and dig up the nest and count the empty shells for the data for Queensland research.”

Very rare turtle with poor survival rate

Department of Environment and Heritage Threatened Species Unit chief scientist Dr Col Limpus said the volunteers were right to be shocked, as the sighting was very rare.

“Albino hatchlings are extremely rare; it probably occurs at the rate of one in many hundreds of thousands of eggs that are laid,” he said.

Dr Limpus said in his 50 years of work with turtles, he was yet to see a record of an albino as a nesting turtle anywhere in the world, which suggested to him that they had a low survival rate.

“Normally they don’t survive coming out of the nest, and when they do, they’re abnormal and not well suited to the environment, which means the chance of survival is very slim,” he said.

Ms Warneminde said the survival rate of all green turtles was already very low.

“In normal hatchlings, there’s one in a 1,000 that reaches maturity,” she said.

She said turtles from Queensland’s coast travelled all the way to Chile, in South America.

“They get in the great eastern current so they have a whole lot of threats that face them, not just predators but plastic debris, and fishing in Chile,” Ms Warneminde said.

But Dr Limpus said that the survival of albino turtles is even lower.

“They’re not particularly suited with colour patterns that would blend and camouflage within the environment and they’re more likely to me taken by predators.”