#surfer-wildlife-interactions

#surfer-wildlife-interactions

Velella velella, commonly called 'by-the-wind sailors,' are jellyfish-like sea creatures that have recently piled up at Baker Beach, forming a striking bluish layer across the sand.

"Every year about this time, females are coming back from their open ocean migrations to give birth somewhere in Southern California, and then those baby white sharks show up at our beaches. What made this year unusual is that we started seeing newborns in February, which is really early. Normally, it starts in April and peaks in July."

Residents of Sauraha are experiencing unexpected visits from rhinos, which has led to a surge in tourism as people seek to see these large animals up close.

The U.S. Department of the Interior has signed separate agreements totaling $885 million with Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind to voluntarily end their offshore wind leases.

Dosio was hoping to kill a yellow-backed duiker, an antelope known for its timid personality, in the Lope-Okanda rainforest area of Gabon.

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."

The crowd atop the Hermosa Beach Pier watched with bated breath as a local fisherman, stripped down to his underwear and armed with only a pair of scissors, waded into the water in an attempt to free a juvenile great white shark.

"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.

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.

If you enter the amounts of different types of plastic that you clean up into the Wildlife Impact Calculator, it will tell you how many animal lives would have been at risk, had those items made their way into the ocean and been ingested.

"Crazy situation yesterday," Virostko wrote on Instagram. "I saw the boat coming as I was outside dodging a big middle peak set. He zoomed by me and I saw he had his family on the boat. As I watched him drive straight into a big white wash I knew they went down and it was time to paddle in as quickly as possible to help save the family."