Deer From Tennessee Has Hairy Eyeballs Due to Bizarre Condition, Can Humans Get Dermoids Too?

In Farragut, Tennessee, there lives a hairy-eyed whitetail deer that suffers from a rare, bizarre condition known as corneal dermoid. ScienceAlert reported that both eyes of the deer have hair protruding from the discs of flesh that cover the transparent part of the eye that covers the iris and pupil, called the cornea.

According to the National Deer Association's Quality Whitetails magazine, only one deer in Tennessee is recorded to have this condition.

By definition, a dermoid is a type of benign tumor that usually appears in other parts of the body. However, in the deer's case, the skin tissue complete with the hair follicle is cropped up in the whitetail deer's cornea.

Hairy-Eyed Deer Suffers Rare, Bizarre Condition

Wildlife biologist Sterling Daniels at the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) told Quality Whitetails that the hairy-eyed deer could tell the difference between night and day but it would be hard for them to see where they are going.

"I'd compare it to covering your eyes with a washcloth. You could tell day from night, but that's about it," Daniels said.

According to the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab, the deer was also diagnosed with epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD), which causes fever, severe tissue swelling, and loss of fear of humans. This might explain the disoriented behavior of the deer who wandered into a suburban street in late August 2020 who seemed to be unaware of the presence of humans.

But that does not explain the condition of the deer's eyes.

Associate professor Dr. Nicole Nemeth from the University of Georgia's Department of Pathology at the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study unit (SCWDS) said that the hairy skin patches likely formed during the early development of the deer.

The cornea formed hair follicles instead of successfully developing into a clear cornea. But beneath all the hair is the complete anatomy of an eye.

Surprisingly, the hairy-eyed deer managed to live over a year and even grew its first set of antlers before testing positive of the untreatable EHD. Nemeth said that the dermoid corneal dermoid probably developed gradually, which allowed the animal to adapt to the decreasing field of vision over time.

Humans Can Also Have Dermoids

According to Live Science, humans can also develop dermoid in the eyes. But it is so rare that a medical doctor might only encounter this case for one or two cases in their entire career.

Dermoid in humans is called the limbal dermoid, characterized by solid mass lesions with hair and are located at the lower temporal limbus of the eye. It contains the cellular elements of skin from the ectoderm, mesoderm, sebaceous and sweat glands, ectopic lacrimal gland, cartilage, and even hair follicle. According to the Columbia University Department of Pathology, limbal dermoid is often associated with congenital ocular abnormalities and other related disorders.

Management of limbal dermoid includes solid mass removal and tumor excision to remove the mass from the eye.

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