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I found this picture of a fox in a news article about arctic foxes in Sweden (source), but I'm not sure whether it is actually an arctic fox.

enter image description here

On the one hand, it has white fur, which is the correct winter coat for an arctic fox. On the other hand, the fox's ears do not have the distinctive shape of arctic fox ears, but ears that look more like red fox ears.

The image credit given by the article is just "iStock", so I searched iStock to see if I could find more information about the photo. I found another photo of the same fox here, also labeled as an arctic fox, but not really any further information.

enter image description here

What species is this fox?

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  • $\begingroup$ It tells you in the source! $\endgroup$ Apr 12, 2016 at 12:48
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    $\begingroup$ @PichiWuana I have only the word of iStock's tags to go on, and that's not exactly trustworthy in an unclear case like this. I have seen images on that site be tagged with multiple species names before. $\endgroup$
    – Gwen
    Apr 12, 2016 at 17:35

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This is a white morph red fox, not an arctic fox.

As noted in the question, this fox has larger, more pointy ears than an arctic fox, and the second picture shows it to have a longer muzzle as well.

Another clue is that these pictures were taken in the springtime or early summer (which you can tell from the new growth on the plants in the picture), and that arctic foxes are only completely white during the winter. During the spring, an arctic fox should look like this:

enter image description here

You can also easily tell that the fox in the picture is not an albino, because of the dark pigment in the nose and eyes.

The red fox has quite a few different color morphs, and this fox looks to be a white color morph.

enter image description here

In that diagram, this fox would be labelled as leucistic (white).

Here are some other white morph red foxes:

enter image description here

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enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ I like how your profile picture matches the subject of the post. +1 for the good answer $\endgroup$
    – Remi.b
    Apr 13, 2016 at 2:31

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