A rare, endangered seal named Yulia basks on Tel Aviv beach

TEL AVIV, Israel — An surprising customer noticed sunbathing on a beach within the Israeli town of Tel Aviv is popping heads and inflicting a media buzz.

But it is not American movie director and Tel Aviv mainstay, Quentin Tarantino, or some other Hollywood superstar — it is Yulia, an endangered Mediterranean monk seal.

The seal cow first gave the impression south of Tel Aviv’s primary beachfront closing Friday. On Tuesday, Yulia drew clusters of curious onlookers to the rocky beach south of Jaffa’s ancient middle.

These seals are indexed as endangered by means of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with as few as 350 mature specimens estimated to exist within the wild. Its populations have dwindled because of ancient seal looking, fishing, and habitat destruction.

Rarely noticed on Israel’s shores, the dwindling Mediterranean monk seal populations are believed to live to tell the tale simplest in a handful of puts within the Mediterranean Sea.

Israel’s Nature and Park Authority has fenced off the phase of beach the place Yulia has come ashore to leisure, and dispatched volunteers to observe her from a distance.

Still, her look is a sensation.

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

Yulia is molting, a multi-day technique of losing her iciness coat, he defined, throughout which period she has been resting on the shore and brought occasional tours out to sea.

Scheinin mentioned fellow researchers from across the japanese Mediterranean have recognized Yulia as up to now noticed in Turkey and Lebanon in recent times. She is estimated to be round two decades previous.

“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,” he mentioned.