Scientist ‘can hardly sleep at night’ as super rare animal causes chaos on beach

A rather large and lazy-looking super rare monk seal has been spotted on an Israeli beach for the first time ever.

And it has been causing havoc as locals flock to see it.

Mediterranean monk seals are one of the most endangered breeds on the planet.

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So when one popped up on a beach in Tel Aviv, there was only one thing locals could do – name it Yulia.

The seal cow first appeared south of Tel Aviv’s main beach front last Friday, and by Tuesday, Yulia named by Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority – drew clusters of curious onlookers to the rocky beach south of the old city of Jaffa’s historic centre.

These seals are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with as few as 350 mature specimens estimated to exist in the wild.

Its population has dwindled due to historic seal hunting, fishing, and habitat destruction, and the breed appears to be struggling to repopulate as a result.

Rarely spotted on Israel’s shores, the dwindling Mediterranean monk seal populations are believed to survive only in a handful of places in the Mediterranean Sea.

As a result of the sighting, and in order to keep the animal calm, Israel’s Parks Authority fenced off the section of beach where Yulia – thought to be around 20-years-old – has come ashore to rest, and dispatched volunteers to monitor her from a distance.

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“This is a very rare event that a monk seal stays for such a long time on the shore,” said Aviad Scheinin, a marine biologist from University of Haifa.

Yulia has come ashore to shed, which is a multi-day process of shedding her winter coat during which time she has been resting on the shore and taken occasional excursions out to sea.

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Scheinin said fellow researchers from around the eastern Mediterranean have previously spotted Yulia in Turkey and Lebanon in recent years.

He added: “I’m researching marine mammals for 20 years; this is the first time that I’m actually seeing such a thing, and I can hardly sleep at night because of that.”

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