The sight of an "extremely rare" albino green turtle on Sunshine Coast's Castaways Beach this week has left onlookers stunned.

The tiny baby turtle, about five centimetres across, was found by environmental volunteer group Coolum and North Shore Coast Care.

President Linda Warneminde said she was shocked at the "pink-eyed, snow white" turtle left in what she thought was an empty nest.

"It looked like a normal turtle hatchling, except that it had a white shell and it had little white flippers, and you could see a little bit of pink under its flippers," she said.

"None of us had ever experienced or seen anything like that before, so we were all a little bit taken aback."

Ms Warneminde and a number of other volunteers were surveying the nest, which had already hatched two days earlier, when they uncovered the little white hatchling lying on its back.

"On Friday we had a green turtle nest that was laid at Castaways Beach," she said.

"Two days later we went to go and dig up the nest and count the empty shells for the data for Queensland research."

Very rare turtle with poor survival rate

The Queensland's Government's Threatened Species Unit chief scientist, Dr Col Limpus, said the volunteers were right to be shocked as the sighting was very rare.

An albino turtle with red eyes is measured by local turtle volunteers ( Contributed: Jayne Walton )

"Albino hatchlings are extremely rare; it probably occurs at the rate of one in many hundreds of thousands of eggs that are laid," he said.

Dr Limpus said in his 50 years of work with turtles, he was yet to see a record of an albino as a nesting turtle anywhere in the world, which suggested to him that they had a low survival rate.

"Normally they don't survive coming out of the nest and when they do they're abnormal and not well suited to the environment, which means the chance of survival is very slim," he said.

Ms Warneminde said the survival rate of all green turtles was already very low.

"In normal hatchlings there's one in 1,000 that reaches maturity," she said.

She said turtles from Queensland's coast travelled all the way to Chile, in South America.

"They get in the great eastern current so they have a whole lot of threats that face them, not just predators but plastic debris, and fishing in Chile," Ms Warneminde said.

But Dr Limpus said that the survival of albino turtles was even lower.

"They're not particularly suited with colour patterns that would blend and camouflage within the environment and they're more likely to be taken by predators," he said.