9.
MULBERRY HARBORS
On June 6, 1944, 156,000 Allied troops descended on the coast of Normandy, France in a mission
to free the country from Nazi control.
Famously known as D-Day, it was the largest seaborne invasion in recorded history.
To facilitate the rapid offloading of supplies, troops, and vehicles, the Allies placed portable
harbors at Omaha Beach and Gold Beach.
These portable harbors were known as Mulberry harbors, and they were developed by the United
Kingdom.
The structures were towed across the English Channel in sections and assembled at their
respective sites.
Each harbor consisted of steel roadways that floated on steel and concrete pontoons.
They were meant to be used for 3 months, but the harbor at Gold Beach, known as “Mulberry
Harbor B” or Port Winston, ended up being used for 10 long months, unloading as much
as 18,000 tons (16,329 metric tons) of supplies daily.
Its remnants are still visible today.
Mulberry Harbor A was only partially built when it was severely damaged in a storm.
It was abandoned the same month the harbors were put in place.
8.
A FISH FAR FROM HOME
Headlines around the world created an uproar in early 2019 when a rare “hoodwinker”
fish washed ashore at the Coal Oil Point Reserve near Santa Barbara, California.
To make things even weirder, the incredibly strange-looking specimen was found thousands
of miles outside its normal range in the Southern Hemisphere.
At first, conservation specialist Jessica Nielsen thought the seven-foot (2.1 meters)
creature was an ocean sunfish, noting in a Facebook post that it was even taller than
it was long.
When he saw Nielsen’s photo, marine biologist Thomas Turner rushed to the beach to get a
firsthand look at the fish.
He posted photos of it online, and they caught the attention of Australian researchers, who
speculated that it was a hoodwinker fish.
Marine scientist Marianne Nyegaard, who discovered and named the species in 2013, was tagged
in the photo.
She told USA Today that she nearly fell off her chair when she first saw the image.
Nyegaard visually confirmed the species, which was later verified through DNA testing.
The hoodwinker is one of five species of sunfish.
Known for their large size and unusual shape, sunfish are considered the world’s heaviest
bony fish.
They grow shockingly fast, reaching as much as 800 pounds (363 kg) during their first
15 months of life.
While it’s not the largest of the sunfish, the hoodwinker is still pretty huge, weighing
up to 2.2 tons (2 metric tons) by adulthood.
Although it’s rarely spotted, documented sightings of it date back to the 19th century.
The beached specimen is one of several that have appeared in and around Monterey Bay,
far from where they’re usually seen off New Zealand and Australia.
Scientists are unsure why some have traveled such a vast distance, but they suspect that
the uncharacteristic movements are somehow tied to climate change.
7.
ABANDONED BUNKERS
During the 19th and 20th centuries, when Russia was under Tsarist rule, a series of concrete
bunkers were built along what is now the Latvian coast.
Known as the Liepaja Northern Forts, they once surrounded the city of Liepaja and functioned
as part of its central fortress.
The buildings were abandoned in 1908, barely a decade after they were finished being built.
Officials decided to desert them after identifying them as a “strategic mistake,” according
to Latvia’s official tourism website.
Attempts to demolish the bunkers with explosives were only partially successful.
Today, the beach remains littered with the crumbling ruins of the structures that survived
the blast.
But the Baltic Sea seems to be taking over with the unfinished demolition work.
Some of the forts have collapsed; others are left standing for now, but it’s only a matter
of time before they, too, succumb to the forces of nature.
Tourists can take guided tours of the Liepaja Northern Forts, where they’ll participate
in a game called “Escape from the USSR.”
It’s more-or-less a mock scenario in which tourists search for a missing friend who was
kidnapped by the Soviets.
To many, the game sounds too eerily realistic to seem like a fun idea.
What do you think?
Are you up for a round, or would you prefer to sit out on the imaginary crisis?
Let me know in the comments below!
6.
DECEPTIVE DUMMY
A volunteer named Kathleen received the scare of a lifetime earlier this year at Perdido
Key in the Florida panhandle.
While helping to clean the beach with an organization called Ocean Hour, she spotted what initially
looked like a decapitated corpse covered in seaweed and barnacles.
The sight was convincing enough at first glance for a fellow volunteer to dial 911.
But Kathleen mustered up the courage to take a closer look and found, much to her relief
and to the relief of concerned onlookers, that she hadn’t discovered a corpse after
all.
It was a mannequin.
So it makes perfect sense why Kathleen thought she had encountered a headless human body,
and why the people around her also panicked.
Nobody ever figured out why or how the mannequin ended up on the beach, but it probably spent
a lot of time in the water to end up encrusted in sea life, according to a Facebook post
by Ocean Hour.
Everyone involved in the clean-up was reportedly glad to learn that it wasn’t a corpse, and
it was removed as part of the organization’s beach-cleaning efforts.
5.
BIZARRE DEAD DOLPHIN
In early 2020, visitors at Destiladeras Beach in the Mexican state of Jalisco were shocked
to discover an eyeless, finless dolphin-like creature with sharp teeth and an eel-like
tail.
Disturbing images of the dead creature went viral on social media, sparking a widespread
frenzy to figure out what, exactly, it was and why it looked the way it did.
Based on the animal’s lack of eyes, locals speculated that it was a deep-dwelling species
that lives in total darkness and has evolved to survive without eyesight.
But even experienced fishermen were unable to identify it when asked by the media if
they knew what it was.
They did point out that there’s an area of the ocean nearby, in Puerto Vallarta, measuring
thousands of feet deep.
Perhaps that’s where the strange creature came from.
Although the bizarre being was never formally identified, social media users were quick
to share their opinions.
One person suggested that the carcass belonged to an eel that became bloated while it decomposed,
making it look more like a dolphin.
What do you think it was?
Let us know in the comments below, and if you’re liking this video, be sure to hit
the thumbs up and subscribe buttons if you haven’t already!
:)
4.
RARE FOOTBALL FISH
Earlier this year, a jet-black football-shaped fish with dozens of razor-sharp teeth washed
ashore on California’s Newport Beach.
A beachgoer discovered the terrifying 18-inch-long (45.7 cm) creature laying in the sand.
Known as the Pacific football fish (Himantolophus sagamius), the species isn’t rare, but it’s
seldom seen because it lives more than 3,000 feet (914.4 meters) below the water’s surface.
It’s one of around 200 known anglerfish species and dwells in complete darkness, where
food is scarce.
As an ambush predator, it lures its prey using a bioluminescent fishing-rod-like appendage
that protrudes from its forehead.
Only female anglerfish, who grow up to two feet (61 cm) long, have this appendage.
Males only reach up to an inch (2.5 cm) in length and exist solely to procreate.
As sexual parasites, they latch onto a female’s body and fuse to her until all that’s left
are their reproductive organs, which enable her to bear offspring.
Nobody knows how a Pacific football fish ended up on Newport Beach back in May.
California Department of Fish and Wildlife employee John Ugoretz told the Los Angeles
Times that it’s uncommon, but not entirely unheard-of, for deep-sea fish to wash ashore.
And while many people think it looks like something out of a nightmare or a horror movie,
the ability to study the fish up-close was a rare treat for scientists.
To their surprise, they recently got another chance to do this.
In the last month, three deep-sea fish have washed ashore in San Diego County.
One of them was a 13-inch-long (33 cm) Pacific football fish.
And even though several of them have been found in recent months, experts still say
it’s an incredibly rare occurrence.
Before this year, the last time a specimen that was in good enough condition for scientific
study appeared on a California beach was 20 years ago.
3.
EXTREMELY RARE SEASHELL
The junonia snail is a large deepwater sea snail that lives in the Gulf of Mexico at
depths between 95 and 413 feet (29-126 meters).
Because it lives miles from the coast, its seashell typically only appears on shore after
a hurricane or a strong storm.
So it’s rare for beachgoers to come across one of these highly-coveted cream-colored
shells, which are covered in spiraling rows of square-ish brown dots.
But it does happen from time to time.
While walking along the shore of Sanibel Island off Fort Myers recently, a tourist from Ohio
named Carolyn Caplan spotted the junonia shell’s distinct pattern in the sand.
At the time, she was with another shell-seeker, whom she warned “You are going to freak
out!”
before plucking the shell off the ground.
After vacationing at Sanibel Island for 45 years and having spent 17 years living in
Key Largo before returning to Cleveland, Caplan had all but given up hope of finding a junonia
shell.
Another Ohio resident, named Bonnie Sipe, discovered one of the highly sought-after
shells on Sanibel Island in September, during a vacation away from Cincinnati.
Unlike Caplan, she had no idea that the junonia shell was so rare when she found it – she
simply thought it looked neat.
A little while later, a fellow visitor was describing the junonia shell to Sipe when
she realized she had one in her possession.
Bonnie told the Sanibel Captiva that without the stranger’s help, she would have never
realized she found something so unique and hard to come by.
2.
NARLUGA SKULL
Almost 30 years ago in 1990, a hunter spotted three strange-looking whales swimming off
the coast of western Greenland.
He managed to get his hands on one of the creature’s skulls, and it was unlike anything
he’d ever seen before.
Researcher Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen suspected that the specimen was a hybrid between a narwhal
and a beluga.
Others speculated that it was a beluga with a defect or disorder of some type.
At the time, DNA technology simply wasn’t advanced enough to say for sure.
For the next several decades, the skull sat in storage at the Natural History Museum of
Denmark.
In 2015, curator Eline Lorenzen decided to take a second look at it.
DNA technology had come a long way since the early ‘90s, and scientists managed to extract
a usable sample.
It turned out that the creature was, indeed, a hybrid.
Born to a narwhal mother and a beluga father, it possessed a bizarre combination of traits
from both.
The weird whale had beluga-like teeth, as well as a twisted, leftward-spiraling bottom
row of narwhal-like chompers.
It lacked the narwhal’s characteristic “horn.”
Scientists had written in a 1993 study that the animal’s teeth were unlike any known
species, but that they seemed fitting for both narwhals and belugas.
The DNA findings simply confirmed that the team was on the right track with their suspicions
after all.
Whale researcher Travis Park, who was not involved in any of the studies, described
the skull as “almost exactly what you’d imagine you’d get if you mixed a beluga
and a narwhal together.”
He added that genetics don’t usually work out so “cleanly.”
The skull is the first solid evidence that narlugas are actually a real thing.
Until the discovery, experts believed that it was nearly impossible for belugas and narwhals
to mate, despite being members of the same family.
The two species diverged from a common ancestor around five-and-a-half million years ago,
and their shared gene flow ended roughly 1.25 million years ago, making it surprising that
they managed to interbreed after so long.
An isotope analysis of the animal’s teeth shows that it dove deeper than either of its
parents in search of food, but besides that, researchers know almost nothing else about
it, and nobody has seen one since.
1.
DEAD SEAL COLONY
Late last year, scientists announced the disturbing discovery of 7,000 dead Cape fur seals in
central Namibia.
The carcasses, which came from the Pelican Point colony, began appearing in September
of 2020, according to conservationist Naude Dreyer, who works with the non-profit Ocean
Conservation.
A month later, Dreyer spotted an alarming number of dead seal fetuses from the same
colony.
An estimated 5,000 to 7,000 female seals had miscarried, leaving the coast littered with
dead baby and adult seals.
Female Cape fur seals typically give birth between mid-November and mid-December.
In the words of Dr. Tess Gridley of the Namibian Dolphin Project, some of the carcasses appeared
“thin-looking, emaciated, with very little fat reserves.”
Experts are at a loss to explain what caused the massive die-off.
They have several theories citing pollution, bacterial infection, and malnutrition as possible
factors.
This isn’t the first time seals have died en masse along the Namibian coast.
Back in 1994, around 10,000 adults and 15,000 fetuses died in the region.
Scientists suspected that food shortage and bacterial infection were to blame, but much
like the uncertainty revolving around the more recent deaths, they don’t know for
sure.
Thanks for watching!
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever found on the beach?
Let us know in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!
See you next time!
Bye! :)