#gray-whale-mortality

#gray-whale-mortality

Experts warn that seal bites can lead to amputations, with many individuals who work with seals having lost parts of their fingers due to bites.

"They didn't even try to fly away. They just feebly made noise," a woman told the Santa Barbara Independent on Saturday after spotting over two dozen dead or dying cormorants near Goleta Beach. "A few were on their stomachs, wings spread [and] gasping for breath.... Heartbreaking."

"Not only are acts like that illegal, but it's really harming a very important, like, a biodiversity hotspot that we have right out here," Brent Fish, an aquarist with Birch Aquarium, stated.

A whale's death offers a unique window and opportunity to study the animal up close and in this particular case, learn more about how this adult female gray whale may have been behaving in San Francisco Bay. We are hopeful that samples taken during the necropsy will shed some further light on the animal's death and help highlight the importance of keeping whales safe while they utilize this urban-wildlife habitat.

The strain the animals have contains a mutation allowing it to more easily transmit between mammals. It is also a different variation than the ones found in dairy cows and commercial poultry. This one is Eurasian in origin, first seen in 2022. It has been detected in birds that fly along the Pacific Flyway, and is responsible for a mass mortality event in 2023 in northern fur seals on an island in eastern Russia.

Our team has been so dedicated working around the clock, over time, whatever it takes to continue monitoring this outbreak. It's a really hard, emotional thing to go through as undergraduate, graduate students and young scientists to watch the seals that you've gotten to know over the years get sick.

'Orcas are psychos,' quipped a close friend recently. He wasn't joking, nor was he ill-informed. In fact, he is probably the world's leading historian of whales and people. He had just watched a BBC Earth clip, narrated by David Attenborough, in which three killer whales separate a male humpback calf from his mother in the waters of Western Australia. The video's closing footage, with two of the orcas escorting the naive youngster to his imminent death, resembles nothing so much as a kidnapping:

Mendocino County is throwing four different whale fests, on the four weekends of March, each in a separate coastal community. After that comes Monterey, in April, with its big annual celebration full of science and wharf fun.

For decades, whale watching has been a seasonal ritual along the Sonoma Coast, drawing locals to wind-swept bluffs, binoculars in hand. Now the pastime has earned national notice: Travel + Leisure has declared Sonoma County the best place in the country to see whales. In a story published Feb. 3, the magazine said there is "no better place" in the United States for whale watching than the stretch of coastline

Shark attacks returned to near-average levels in 2025 after a dip the previous year, according to the latest report from the Florida Museum of Natural History's International Shark Attack File, published Wednesday. Researchers recorded 65 unprovoked shark bites worldwide last year, slightly below the 10-year average of 72, but an increase from 2024. Nine of those bites were fatal, higher than the 10-year average of six fatalities.

For decades, whale watching has been a seasonal ritual along the Sonoma Coast, drawing locals to wind-swept bluffs, binoculars in hand. Now the pastime has earned national notice: Travel + Leisure has declared Sonoma County the best place in the country to see whales. In a story published Feb. 3, the magazine said there is no better place in the United States for whale watching than the stretch of coastline from Bodega Bay to Gualala and no better time than now.

For travelers looking to get to know the many-varied charms of the Golden State, discovering it through the best beaches in California is never a bad idea. The state's coastline spans a vast 3,427 miles after all. Among its 420 public beautiful beaches are plentiful opportunities to swim, lay out, look at tide pools, surf to your heart's content, or watch the sunset.

The wolves arrived in May of last year, just days after Paul Roen had driven his cattle back up to their summer pasture in Northern California's Sierra Valley. He started finding the bleeding bodies of calves-some still alive, so badly paralyzed that they'd need to be shot. After weeks of this, Roen finally saw a kill himself. "One wolf grabbed a cow and spun her around, while another grabbed a calf," he told me. "He tore it into three pieces in 30 seconds."