White humpback whale, thought to be one of four, caught on camera

A white humpback whale spotted over the weekend is believed to be Migaloo, the most famous of the four known whales of its kind.

A group conducting the annual Cook Strait Whale Survey Sunday spotted the animal off the coast of New Zealand. They said when they approached a normal black humpback whale with their boat, they were delighted to discover that it was swimming alongside an extremely rare white humpback whale.

"This is so unique. I have never seen anything like this in New Zealand," Carlos Olavarria, a marine mammal scientist who was on the boat, told the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

The group believes it's Migaloo, a white humpback whale who is usually seen off the coast of Australia, and they took a DNA sample to get confirmation. This whale's distinctive dorsal fin looked like Migaloo's, survey leader Nadine Bott said. The only other known white humpback whales are Migaloo's two calves, also known to be spotted near Australia, and another white whale in Norway.

The Department of Conservation is optimistic about the findings of the survey. The department wrote that the survey this year yielded a "spectacularly high count of humpback whales," the highest so far from the 4-year-old survey. Previously the highest was 106 humpbacks in 2012. This year there were 122, including the rare white whale.