Across the globe, beaches have seen their fair share of weird blobs washing ashore. Small and weird debris has been found many times, including tar balls that dotted Israel’s Mediterranean coastline in February or a tangled rope coral that found its way onto a beach in Texas.
Other times, organisms numbered in the millions, such as the by-the-wind sailor jellyfish whose corpses were stranded across shores.
Here is a list of wild and strange things that ended up on beaches in the year 2021, as compiled by Live Science.
Millions of ‘sailor’ jellyfish
Why are some Velella stranding events so much more massive than others? A study published in March 2021 found that the biggest stranding events occurred in years with record high ocean surface temperatures, driven by a phenomenon known as “the blob.” The blob warms surface waters in the Pacific Ocean, fostering larger colonies of Velella at sea; when the winds change, those massive colonies end up on shore, littering beaches with millions of jelly carcasses. This trend of mass die-offs will likely continue as global warming escalates over the coming decades.
A juvenile killer whale was heroically rescued in January after getting stranded on a Scottish beach. A group of trained medics from the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) and helpful locals carried out the rescue on Sanday, an island off the coast of Scotland. After determining the animal was healthy and old enough to survive on its own, they managed to get it off its side and onto a special dolphin stretcher. It took eight people to lift the 11-foot-long (3.4 meter) orca into deeper water. Then, it suddenly headed off and was never seen again.
The entire rescue took just over an hour, but BDMLR area coordinator Neave-Webb, who led the rescue, believes it was only possible because of the team’s newly acquired dolphin stretcher and the help of the locals. “It was a lucky animal to strand on an island with people who knew what they were doing and had the equipment to save it,” she told Live Science. “It definitely chose the right place to throw itself on the beach.”
A truck-size basking shark
A male basking shark measuring 26 feet (8 meters) long washed up on the coast of Bremen, Maine in January, stunning local fishermen with its pickup-truck-sized body. Basking sharks live in warm waters across the world, and are the second largest fish in the sea; Only the elusive whale shark, which measures up to 60 feet (18 m), is longer. Despite their formidable size, basking sharks are harmless to humans. They mainly prefer to cruise through the water with mouths open, filtering tasty zooplankton and tiny invertebrates through their complex gills. As for the Bremen shark’s cause of death? Marine researchers still aren’t sure.
Twisted ‘rope pile’ on a Texas beach
40 refloated whales in New Zealand
Toxic tar balls wash up on Israel’s coastline
Amazon ‘river monster’ turns up dead in Florida
The arapaima is one of the world’s largest freshwater fish, and can grow to be 10 feet (3 meters) long and up to 440 lbs. (200 kilograms). But it has a few quirks: It breeds only in nests on flood plains, spends valuable time and energy caring for its young, and doesn’t reach sexual maturity until it’s about 5 feet (1.5 m) long and at least 3 to 5 years old, Solomon David, an aquatic ecologist at Nicholls State University in Louisiana who wasn’t involved with the recent arapaima sighting, told Live Science.
What’s more, it would take many arapaimas to set up a viable population in Florida, and just one dead arapaima has been found so far, David noted. But wildlife officials should still be on the lookout just in case these fish get a foothold in the Sunshine State, he said.
Majestic moofish surprises Oregon beachgoers
Even more surprising than its appearance was finding the fish hundreds of miles from home. These pelagic, or open ocean, fish are typically found off the coast of California and near Hawaii, so finding one so far north is extremely rare. As for why the hefty fish had meandered so far north, global warming could be the culprit; as ocean temperatures heat up, opah are leaving their too-balmy homes for once-colder dwellings. “We are seeing some marine organisms moving northward as ocean temperatures increase,” Heidi Dewar, a research biologist with NOAA Fisheries who was not involved in the recovery, told The Washington Post.
And the fish’s “life” wasn’t over quite yet: Scientists at the Seaside Aquarium in Oregon froze the beached opah so that students this year could dissect its scaly remains.
A fish inside a jellyfish
Dead jellyfish dotting the shoreline are typically nothing to stop and look at. But in August, a peculiar blob caused beachgoers in the U.K. to take notice. This cnidarian had an undigested fish in its translucent bell for all to see. The juvenile fish must have been consumed right before the hungry compass jellyfish (Chrysaora hysoscella) — named for its brown, V-shaped markings that are reminiscent of a compass — met its end as well.
A local photographer who spotted the beached jelly while walking his dog near Padstow in Cornwall on Aug. 4, said “It’s not something you see every day,” according to The Daily Mail.
Record-breaking sawfish ‘mom’ a boon to science
This toothy invertebrate never got to bask in the glory of breaking a world record for largest smalltooth sawfish ever recorded. That’s because the animal was dead when scientists found (and measured) it in the Florida Keys in April. Perhaps on the bright side, the 16-foot-long (4.9 meters) specimen was a boon to science. The fish had softball-size eggs in her reproductive tract, meaning scientists could study the carcass to learn more about this individual’s age and reproductive past, as well as that for her species,
“Although it’s a sad occurrence when a big animal like that dies, from a scientific standpoint we knew we could learn a lot from it,” said Gregg Poulakis, a fish biologist at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “That makes us feel a little bit better about having lost such a big female.”
‘Death in a dumpster’ washes up in Plymouth
Some beached animals garner attention for their looks, while others just smell really, really bad. That was the case for a minke whale found dead in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in July, which locals said had such a bad odor it was “like death in a dumpster,” according to news reports at the time.
Typically, a whale carcass like this one would be left on the beach to naturally decompose, where it could serve as a buffet for scavengers before the nutrients seep back into the ecosystem. But this 21-foot-long (6.4 meters) carcass was way too smelly and way too close to town.
“I live up the hill over on the other side, and there are days when you walk outside hoping to smell sea air and all you can smell is dead whale,” local resident Lynn Holdsworth told NBC Boston in July. “And it’s like death in a dumpster. It’s horrible.”
NOAA Northeast/Mid-Atlantic worked with the nearby homeowner’s association (HOA) that was responsible for the beach to figure out a disposal plan. The HOA then got heavy equipment to haul the whale to the nearby Bourne landfill.
