Firstly, I am not arguing the statement that this bear is not leucistic. In fact I am happily learning new things from this thread.
Secondly, my understanding of blue eye color comes from personal observation. White tigers invariably have blue eyes while orange tigers have yellow eyes. White lions have blue (or blue-green) eyes while tan lions have yellow eyes. At my local zoo, the brown rhea has dark brown eyes while the white rhea has blue eyes. The correlation seems consistent (eg white tigers never have yellow eyes), so why am I wrong in assuming blue eyes go with leucism?
I am not being argumentative, just sharing my observation. I freely admit these are ad hoc observations and not based on any scientific analysis I have read. As I said, I am happy to learn new things and will be interested to hear if anyone knows the correlation or not between leucism and eye color.
there isn't a "debate fire" - there are multiple genetic causes for leucism (i.e. "leucism" is kind of a general term for the effect not the cause), so some types of leucism do cause blue eyes. However typically the eyes are unaffected, so the implication of your post #8 (and #11) of leucistic animals always having blue eyes was inaccurate.
There are some forms of albinism, incidentally, which also cause blue eyes.
The reason the Kermode bear is considered a colour phase and not leucistic (despite many online articles saying it is) is that just the fur is white, otherwise it is identical to any other Black Bear, including in the colour of the skin. A not-very-accurate analogy might be to think of Arctic wolves - just because their fur is white whereas other wolves are grey or brown, that doesn't mean they are leucistic.
As I know it, it is definately simply a colour phase, not leucism, as actually Black Bear comes in four different ones- Black, Cinnamon/Orange, 'Blue' (as rare as the White and I saw one at San Diego many years ago) and the very rare White.
Do they have a normal Black companion for this bear? I always think unusual colour morphs display better when kept with a normal counterpart for comparison.
@Pertinax The long-term plan is to perhaps place traditionally-coloured American Black Bears in with "Clover" but for now he is alone. The zoo has a separate exhibit (a rather good one) for a few black bears.
