World

Team Races Against Time to Save a Tangled Sea Lion in British Columbia

Published

3 months ago

December 16, 2025

Team Races Against Time to Save a Tangled Sea Lion in British Columbia

A team of marine mammal experts had spent several days in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia, searching for a sea lion with an orange rope wrapped around its neck. As the sun set on Dec. 8, they were packing up, for good, when a call came in.

The tangled animal, a female Steller sea lion weighing 330 pounds, had been spotted on a dock in front of an inn, leading into the bay in southwestern Canada.

The rope was wrenched four times around her neck, carving a deep gash. Without help, the sea lion would die.

The team had been trying to find the sea lion for a month, and on that day, with daylight running out, the nine members that day knew they needed to work fast. They relaunched their boats and a team member loaded a dart gun and shot her with a sedative.

“Launching the dart is the easiest part of the whole operation,” said Dr. Martin Haulena, executive director of the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Society, which conducted the rescue alongside Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “It’s everything that happens after that, that you just have no control over.”

Steller sea lions, also known as northern sea lions, are the largest such breed. They are found as far south as Northern California and in parts of Russia and Japan. A male Steller sea lion can weigh up to 2,500 pounds.

The Cowichan Tribes Marine Monitoring Team assisted the rescue society, calling it whenever the sea lion was spotted. The tribe named her Stl’eluqum, meaning “fierce” or “exceptional” in Hul’q’umi’num’, an Indigenous language, according to the rescue society.

After Stl’eluqum was sedated, she jumped from the dock into the water. Recent torrential rains and flooding had stirred up debris, making the water brown, and harder to spot the sea lion, Dr. Haulena said.

Several minutes after the sea lion dived into the bay, the drone spotted her and the team moved in.

The rope had multiple strands and it was wrapped so deeply that she most likely wasn’t able to eat, Dr. Haulena said. At first, the team had trouble freeing her.

“You couldn’t see it because it was way dug in underneath the skin and blubber of the animal,” Dr. Haulena said.

After unraveling the rope, the team tagged her flipper, gave her some antibiotics and released her.

Freeing the sea lion was the culmination of weeks of searching and missed moments. The first call about the tangled marine mammal was made to the Fisheries and Oceans Canada hotline on Nov. 7, according to a news release from the rescue society. Then the society logged more calls.

The Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Society, a nonprofit that works in partnership with the Vancouver Aquarium, searched for several days for the sea lion. The day they found her was the last of the rescue effort because bad weather was forecast for the area around the bay. The call that led them to Stl’eluqum came from the Cowichan Tribes, Dr. Haulena said.

The society, Dr. Haulena said, cares for about 150 marine mammals from its rescues every year — sea lions, otters, harbor seals and the occasional sea turtle. The group gives medical care to animals it takes in, such as Luna, an abandoned newborn sea otter who was three pounds when she was found and still had her umbilical cord attached.

Many of the society’s rescues involve animals tangled in garbage or debris, Dr. Haulena said.

Stl’eluqum was tangled in nylon rope commonly used to tie boats or crab traps, he said. When sea lions get something caught around their necks it can grow tighter until it cuts into their organs, sometimes fatally, he said.

“It’s our garbage; it’s our fault,” Dr. Haulena said. “It’s a large amount of animal suffering and not a good outcome unless we can do something.”

Click to comment

World

Live possum discovered hiding among plush toys in an Australian airport gift shop

Published

10 hours ago

March 21, 2026

Press Room

Live possum discovered hiding among plush toys in an Australian airport gift shop

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

Someone was playing possum — or stuffed animal.

Among plush kangaroos, dingoes and Tasmanian devils ready to be bought by parents of antsy children, a live brushtail possum waited in a gift shop at an Australian airport this week.

The wild animal was first noticed by a shopper in the store on Wednesday, retail manager Liam Bloomfield of Hobart Airport in the state of Tasmania said.

“A passenger reported it to …. one of the staff members on shift who couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing,” Bloomfield told The Associated Press. “She then called the (airport) management and said we’ve got a possum in the store.”

TOURISTS IN LAS VEGAS PAY $1,000 FOR DINNER ON THE STRIP WHILE SHARKS EAT LIKE ROYALTY

A live Australian brushtail possum sits on the display shelf at a terminal shop at Hobart Airport in Hobart, Australia, on Wednesday. (Melissa Oddie via AP)

Staff at the airport were able to remove the animal without harming it.

“I’m imaging it saw some of the plush animals that were for sale on the shelf and it decided to make its home with those,” Bloomfield joked of why the possum was hiding with the stuffed toys. “It wanted to blend in.”

EXPERT SOUNDS ALARM AFTER STUDY FINDS POPULAR TRAVEL ITEM CARRIES FAR MORE BACTERIA THAN EXPECTED

The arrivals area at Hobart Airport in Australia. (Steve Bell/Getty Images)

“Can you spot the imposter?” the airport wrote in a Facebook post Thursday that showed the possum curled up in a cubby with its stuffed counterparts.

“This cheeky lost possum found a clever hiding place among the Aussie plushies in our retail store,” the airport continued. “Luckily it was safely relocated out of the terminal area and the space was cleaned.”

Passengers boarding a plane at Hobart Airport in Australia. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Bloomfield said the possum not only found a way into the airport but also their hearts.

“We’ll have a little shrine to the possum,” he revealed, according to The Independent. “There will be a nice little photo; once it gets a name, we will put a nice little post in front of the store to make sure it’s remembered.”

World

Curro Rodríguez: from bankruptcy to global water empire

Published

12 hours ago

March 21, 2026

Press Room

Curro Rodríguez: from bankruptcy to global water empire

Published on 20/03/2026 – 15:00 GMT+1•Updated
15:23

From a start-up founded in Malaga in 2015 with a few thousand euros, Ly Company has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing multinationals, and a global leader in the sustainable water packaging sector.

With ten factories located across Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, Ly Company produces about 10 million bottles of water in cardboard packaging per month.

Unlike most competitors, Ly Company doesn’t owe its success to mass retail firms.

It sells personalised products to more than 3,000 brands, ranging from airlines and hotel chains to private transport companies and major events organisers. “There is a lot of water in sectors where no one thinks it is consumed”, notes Rodríguez. “An airline, for example, can consume 50 million bottles per year.”

The company is now targeting China and, above all, the United States.

Its positioning is also based on sustainability: factories powered by green energy, cardboard from responsibly managed forest, bioplastic made from sugar cane and water guaranteed to be microplastics-free. Part of the profits fund his “Agua y Vida” Foundation, which is involved in environmental and humanitarian projects.

“I’ve gone through some very difficult times. Now that I’m doing well, I want to give something back to society”, explains Curro Rodríguez.

Behind this rise lies a chaotic journey. While working as a first-responder in emergency medical services for twenty years, he was simultaneously launching businesses, sometimes risky ones. Two successive bankruptcies saw him resort to food aid and doing odd jobs for a while, before he reinvented himself.

“My passion is bringing projects to life”, explains Curro Rodríguez, who has founded a total of 39 companies, 23 of which are currently active within his holding company. “When things are done out of emotion, and not for money, they create value. The money follows. But you have to look for value first”, he concludes, a big smile on his face.

World

Video: What Tunnel Entrances Reveal About a Key Iranian Nuclear Site

Published

21 hours ago

March 20, 2026

Press Room

Video: What Tunnel Entrances Reveal About a Key Iranian Nuclear Site

new video loaded: What Tunnel Entrances Reveal About a Key Iranian Nuclear Site

transcript

What Tunnel Entrances Reveal About a Key Iranian Nuclear Site

Satellite images show how Iran has tried to bolster its defenses at parts of the Isfahan nuclear facility.

: What you’re seeing here are buried tunnel entrances at a nuclear facility in Iran. It’s one of the most important sites in the country for U.S. and Israeli forces. U.N. inspectors think that roughly half of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is buried here. And these three entrances are the only known ways to access it. If you think about nuclear sites in Iran, three main sites come to mind. They’re pretty well known: Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. Natanz and Fordo, They were largely taken out in U.S. strikes last year. So I’ve been focusing on Isfahan. The uranium here is still relatively accessible. It’s actually a pretty large complex. This area here was very important for uranium processing, but it was heavily hit by the U.S. and Israel last June. If you go a little bit further north, that is underground and that requires tunnels to enter. In a terrain view, it gets quite interesting. There are three roads that lead to these tunnel entrances, and these tunnel entrances have become very important, both last year, but also right now. They lead to the underground facility where U.N. inspectors say uranium is stored and a new enrichment site could be located. If this falls into the wrong hands, that would be a problem in the long term. Here’s a great example of how very recent satellite imagery gives us new insights. This is from late January of this year, and what you see here is a line of trucks. And they’re filled with soil, and they’re lining up to go to some of these tunnel entrances. If you look a little bit closer here, you see another one of these trucks that’s just unloading some of the soil and some earthmoving equipment. Iran in preparation for any possible attacks at that point. They try to protect this facility a little bit more. So this is Jan. 29. And if you just look a few days later, we go to Feb. 2. This is the completely buried tunnel entrance, completely covered in soil to protect from any attack. And this is how it still looks in mid-March. The U.S. and Israel have basically two options here: The first one is to heavily bombard the entrances to this underground complex that would block any access, at least in the near future. They haven’t done that yet. So that’s very, very interesting — a little bit surprising. And it might point towards a second option: That would be to go in with ground forces and to extract the uranium. But that would require a really large amount of troops to secure the vast area, bringing in earthmoving equipment to clear the tunnels and a lot of time in hostile territory.
Advertisement