HispanicBusiness

Remember that purple squirrel a Pennsylvania couple claimed to have found and then released into the wild? It's not going away.

The squirrel has, but the story hasn't.

"I kept telling my husband I saw a purple (squirrel) out in the yard," Connie Emert told AccuWeather.com. He didn't believe her. "Well," she said, "he checked the trap around noon on Sunday and sure enough, there it was."

Speculation on how the squirrel came to be purple included the notion that it had gotten hold of a purple ink cartridge, that it had run through a pokeberry bush and that it had fallen into a chemical toilet.

Related story: Purple Squirrel Released Into Wild

Accuweather.com broke the story.

A commenter on the original post passed along the alarming theory that the color could come from water contaminated by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process for releasing petroleum, natural gas and other fossil fuels from source rocks. Fracking is practiced in Pennsylvania.

"The squirrel has too much bromide in its system possibly from all the bromide laced frack water it's been drinking," Krish Pillai, of Lock Haven University, wrote in the comments section of the original post. "I would raise the alarm. This could mean bladder cancer for humans down the road."

The Washington Post asked a zoo curator what he thought about that.

"I would find it amazing that it had that kind of effect," Henry Kacprzyk at the Pittsburgh Zoo told the Post.

"Mammals don't normally uptake color, ingest something it goes through and (then) it comes out through their fur."

Related story: Regulations Start To Catch Up as Fracking Flourishes