The Brief

A coalition of teachers and students is suing to block the implementation of a new California law that aims to address antisemitism concerns in K-12 public schools, amid ongoing debate over how classrooms can approach the latest conflict in the Middle East.

A judge is expected to hear arguments on Wednesday at the Northern District of California’s San José division. The lawsuit, filed by Jenin Younes, national legal director of the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee, claims that AB 715, which is set to take effect Jan. 1, 2026, is unconstitutionally vague.

“The real purpose of the bill is to chill the speech of teachers and students so that they’re afraid to talk about anything that could be deemed critical of Israel,” Younes said.

AB 715 adds to existing anti-discrimination state law through the creation of a governor-appointed Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator under a new California Office of Civil Rights. Proponents of AB 715 have said the coordinator will track antisemitic incidents at schools, help respond to cases and make policy recommendations to the state Legislature. 

The coordinator will also be tasked with training schools to identify antisemitism. The state law directs districts to rely on the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. This federal guide, in turn, refers to the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

Children play outside at the Jewish Family Services shelter for migrants in San Diego, Sept. 19, 2024. (Zoë Meyers for KQED)The Alliance’s definition includes 11 bullet-pointed descriptors of anti-Jewish bias. More than half of the list cites Israel, such as “claiming the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” and “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel.”

Earlier iterations of AB 715 echoed — and expanded — on the IHRA’s definition. According to those versions — later stricken — an antisemitic learning environment could mean classrooms where instruction or materials assert “dual loyalty directed at Jewish individuals or communities,” “inaccurate historical narratives such as labeling Israel a settler colonial state” or discriminating against a “nationality,” including “a social organization where a collective identity has emerged from a combination of shared features.”

“The earlier iterations were pretty crazy,“ said Younes, who has argued that the final version of AB 715 has the same effect “surreptitiously.”

“It’s been an incredibly frustrating process,” said David Bocarsly, executive director of the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California and one of the main backers of the law.

Bocarsly said the committee started off its efforts as California mandated new ethnic studies courses to ensure they didn’t include antisemitic content. After pushback from educators, he said proponents decided to set their sights instead on protecting Jewish students more generally — in what eventually became AB 715. (A companion law, SB 48, creates four similar coordinator positions for religion, race, gender and LGBTQ+ discrimination prevention.)

“So, even this one bill that we asked to be focused just on the Jewish community because there was a particular acute need for our community, where there were opportunities to expand and support other vulnerable communities, we ultimately leapt at those opportunities,” Bocarsly said.

Teachers still weren’t on board with revisions to AB 715. In a statement, David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, the union that represents teachers in the state, said the law “raises serious free speech concerns” and “at a time when too many are seeking to attack academic freedom and weaponize public education, AB 715 would unfortunately arm ill-intentioned people with the ability to do so.”

The new law allows the public to anonymously file complaints not just about teacher materials they believe are discriminatory, but also instruction.

“Anytime that I meet with more than two teachers who are ethnic studies teachers in a group, this is one of the things that comes up. It’s like, ‘Hey, no one knows all the things that’re happening to us, and no one is really helping us,’” said Jason Muñiz, who supports around 500 Bay Area teachers in ethnic studies each year as part of his work with the University of California at Berkeley’s History-Social Science Project.

Muñiz said dozens of teachers have described becoming the subject of legal inquiries, including public records, related to lessons that touch on Judaism, Islam or the Middle East.

Bocarsly acknowledged the pressure that academic institutions face, noting that JPAC has spoken out against the Trump administration’s attempts to use antisemitism legislation as an excuse to cut school funding or diversity programs.

“We have gone through three different iterations of bills, have taken so many of [the educators’] recommendations, and they continue to move the goalposts and oppose everything that we do,” said Bocarsly, who considers the alleged lack of willingness to focus on Jewish student safety itself discrimination. “I think that there’s some implicit bias happening here.”

In the state’s official response to the motion for an injunction, California Attorney General Rob Bonta has argued that AB 715 does not create a new, undefined type of civil rights violation. He has said that fears of unfounded discrimination claims could happen under existing law and are not enough reason to block AB 715.

Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul, was sentenced in Manhattan to 15 years in prison Wednesday for a felony sex crime in another #MeToo reckoning.

Weinstein’s sentencing for sexually assaulting one-time TV production assistant Miriam Haley followed a legal odyssey spanning more than six years. His 2020 conviction was overturned by New York’s highest court, citing testimony from other women whose allegations weren’t part of the case. A second jury found Weinstein guilty again at a retrial last year.

Once among the most powerful figures in the entertainment industry, Weinstein was an Oscar-winning producer whose hits included “Shakespeare in Love,” “Pulp Fiction” and “Chocolat.” But his downfall came quickly after sexual assault allegations in 2017 set off the #MeToo movement.

Weinstein, 74, is expected to appeal. He is now likely to remain behind bars until at least his late 80s. He has denied raping or sexually assaulting anyone. Seated in a wheelchair, he was quickly wheeled out of the courtroom after the sentencing, while some of his accusers hugged and brushed away tears.

Weinstein and his victim both spoke in court

Weinstein faced up to 25 years in prison for sexually assaulting Haley at his Manhattan apartment in 2006. He has already served more than six years as his case has cycled again and again through the criminal justice system. Haley gave her account of the assault at two trials, and addressed the court Wednesday just before Weinstein was sentenced.

“Having been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein has had a devastating effect on my life and sense of security that may never go away. Making the decision to speak up will have me looking over my shoulder for years to come,” Haley said. “It’s a life sentence for me.”

“I’ve been further traumatized in exercising my right to hold him accountable. All of this traces back to his actions,” she said, adding that she thought about ending her pursuit of justice many times.

Minutes later, Weinstein apologized in court to those he may have hurt. “I do have remorse for Miriam Haley’s pain, but I have to reiterate my innocence,” he told the judge.

Judge Curtis Farber said Weinstein was once a king in the movie industry, “but recognition for these achievements will pale in comparison to what you did.”

He said Weinstein is now known as “a sexual predator, the literal face of the MeToo movement.”

Why Weinstein is being sentenced a second time

Weinstein was originally sentenced to 23 years in prison after a jury convicted him of assaulting Haley and raping an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, in 2013.

Tried for a second time last year, he was again convicted of a first-degree criminal sex act for assaulting Haley, who has also gone by the name Mimi Haleyi. In a messy split verdict, the jury acquitted him of forcibly performing oral sex on another woman, Kaja Sokola, and could not reach a verdict on a rape charge involving Mann.

“I will be proven innocent. That I promise you,” Weinstein told The Hollywood Reporter in a jailhouse interview in March.

After another retrial ended in a hung jury in May, Manhattan prosecutors dropped the rape charge rather than pursue a fourth trial after Mann said she could not bear to testify again. That decision cleared the way for Weinstein’s sentencing.

Weinstein’s health issues pushed the defense to ask for leniency

Defense lawyer Jacob Kaplan asked that Weinstein receive a sentence of three more years on top of the six years he’s already served, saying a longer sentence would make it more likely that Weinstein dies in prison.

Weinstein is in failing health and has been in the hospital six times since 2025, Kaplan said, while dealing with blood cancer, congestive heart failure, and kidney issues.

Weinstein is also awaiting resentencing in a separate rape case in Los Angeles. A California appeals court upheld the 2022 conviction but threw out his original 16-year sentence because the judge had considered his New York convictions — that were later thrown out — as an aggravating factor.

After shuffling between state prison, where he tested positive for COVID-19 early in the pandemic, and New York City’s notorious Rikers Island complex, the ailing Weinstein is now housed at a medical unit for jail inmates at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.

His health issues in recent years have included chronic myeloid leukemia, diabetes and walking difficulties, his lawyers said. Two years ago, he underwent emergency surgery to remove fluid on his heart and lungs.

Haley describes the assault that led to Weinstein’s conviction

Haley, 49, is a former entertainment producer now working in advertising.

Born in Finland and raised in Sweden, she said she met Weinstein through a mutual connection and worked briefly as a production assistant on a reality competition show that he produced, “Project Runway.”

Haley said she accepted an invitation to visit Weinstein’s Manhattan apartment because it would have been odd to decline since she was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles the next day on his company’s dime to attend a film premiere.

After she and Weinstein briefly chatted on his living room sofa, he lunged to kiss her, she testified. She said she leaped up and rebuffed him, but he grabbed her, forcibly backed her into a bedroom and sexually assaulted her, ignoring her pleas to stop.

She recalled Weinstein asking, “Don’t you think we’re much closer now?” after either the alleged assault or a subsequent occasion when she says she had unwanted, but not forced, sex with him.

She also recalled telling him after the second encounter, “You know you can’t keep doing this.”

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Haley, Sokola and Mann have done.

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Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.

Tanner “The Planner" Blackman does not swing hammers or lay foundations. He does not raise funds or finesse land deals. He does not draft blueprints, write contracts, test soil conditions or calculate the varied seismic loads that a new building can sustain.

Blackman’s job is a mostly under the radar, but often indispensable, fixture of California’s urban housing market: He helps people get their building projects approved.

So-called land-use consultants and permit expediters are wayfinders of bureaucracy, sherpas of red tape. If the left hand of a city’s building safety department doesn't know what the right hand of its sanitation bureau is doing, the expediter's job is to pull them into a handshake.

Such services are not in demand everywhere in California. Wherever the path from preliminary application to permit issued is so costly, tedious and unpredictable that developers and desperate homeowners are willing to pay someone else to endure the journey on their behalf, expediters flourish. Los Angeles is one of those places. It’s also where Blackman does most of his work, even though he lives in San Diego.

And yes, he feels a little weird about all of this.

Speaking over Zoom, Blackman wears glasses, a Dodgers hat and the ironic grin of a self-described former urban planning “do-gooder.” As an example of the duties his job sometimes entails, he recounts a recent trip to Los Angeles.

Projects located in L.A.’s hillside neighborhoods require special municipal permission to have dirt taken away. The project Blackman represents is not in a hillside neighborhood, but it is on a road that passes through one, which evidently amounts to the same thing. A city board had approved an earlier dirt removal plan but with allowable hauling hours so narrow the developer estimates the dirt removal would drag on an additional six weeks. Rather than go back to the board, Blackman had to take his case to city council, arguing against this previously approved dirt plan in order to revise it.

Because of course he did.

“This whole stupid thing, we had to do this fire drill, get a bunch of extra billable hours for people like me,” he said. “In a perfect world, my job would not need to exist.”

Los Angeles, like many of California’s big cities, is far from Blackman’s perfect world. The state grapples with some of the most expensive housing in the country. For decades, many experts have pointed to the cumbersome and unpredictable pace of getting new homes approved in our desirable metros as one of, if not the, major cause of our housing affordability woes.

State lawmakers have tried to speed things up. They’ve passed dozens of bills aimed at simplifying residential development over the last decade.

But even though Blackman profits off of the regulatory wrinkles that this legislative blitz is supposed to have smoothed out, the new rules don't keep him up at night. Yes, state laws have created new pathways to speedily approve new housing. But there’s still plenty of work out there finding ways to design and coax projects to fit onto those pathways.

“This just creates a new space for us to fight around,” he said.

Meet the fixer

Blackman didn’t set out to become a project pusher.

Fresh out of graduate school, he got a job with the Los Angeles Planning Department and spent most of his five years there studying possible changes to municipal policy. It was illuminating work, but disillusioning too. “After having been inside the beast for a while, I was less convinced that I was on the side of good,” he said. “I felt like the villain in a Kafka novel.”

He landed his first consulting gig in 2015 where he found the work more compatible with his personality. “I’m better at finding the loopholes rather than being the guy who can keep the boat afloat.”

The work goes by a number of different names, which vary by location and speciality. “Land use consultant” is one you’d most like to have on your business card, conferring a degree of cerebral respectability and an expertise in zoning, environmental review and the overlapping complexities of state and local law most relevant at the early “entitlement” stage of development.

Then there’s “permit expediter,” a title that connotes the more lowly trade of assembling the right papers in the right order and pushing them from one city clerk’s window to another.

In fact, Blackman does both jobs. He’s also a registered lobbyist, as are most members of his professional tribe in Los Angeles. He describes his work as “kind of like a lawyer but cheaper” and “project manager,” though not in the corporate sort of way. Tanner Blackman will also accept merely “planner” — “it helps to have a job that rhymes with your name.”

In the plainest of English, he’s a regulatory real estate fixer. Lucky for him, there’s plenty of demand for fixers in Los Angeles. Getting a project okayed is no simple task.

Tanner Blackman works in his home office in San Diego on Sept. 21, 2026. Tanner is a land use consultant who helps clients navigate through paperwork and permits to get housing building projects approved.

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Adriana Heldiz

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CalMatters

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First a project will often need permission, in general terms, to use a particular piece of land in a particular way — to build a house of a certain size or an apartment building of a specified height. In the City of Los Angeles, that entitlement process, overseen by the planning department, takes an average of 8.5 months, according to data collected by the state housing department. But it can take much longer than that. The project Blackman needed the haul route permit for was stuck in entitlement for nearly five years.

After the thumbs up from planning comes a gauntlet of project-specific approvals. Can the proposed building withstand an earthquake? Will it be vulnerable to fire? Does it comply with state and local energy efficiency standards? Is it accessible to those with disabilities? Do trees need to be added to the site? Removed? All of these questions require an answer and every answer comes in the form of a permit.

That’s assuming you know how to get them in the first place.

A typical project might include 25 separate reviews and clearances, said Gary Benjamin, another L.A-based consultant, who spoke to CalMatters earlier this year. “If you aren’t someone like myself who has navigated this process multiple times, you may not even know who to contact,” he said.

Putting a price on permitting

Such complexity is why the City of Los Angeles hosts a thriving market in “ready-to-issue” parcels, plots of bare land that have undergone all the regulatory prep work necessary to build something, but which are physically untouched. From the sidewalk, a vacant lot with the coveted “RTI” designation would look identical to the same one without it. On paper, the RTI plot is months, if not years further down the approval pipeline.

That makes it much more valuable.

In a recent study, two economists compared the sales prices of lots before and after they’d received the “ready-to-issue” label. Across Los Angeles County, they found, such a state of regulatory readiness adds about 50% to the raw land value.

To put that in perspective, imagine a typical $1.5 million patch of development-primed dirt. Only $1 million of that price reflects the value of the actual land, according to the study. The remaining $500,000 comes from the value of not having to wade through the local review process — and pay insurance, property tax and interest payments while you wait.

That, according to the authors, is the price tag on LA’s approval process.

Which helps explain why people like Blackman can charge tens of thousands of dollars to the developers, builders and landowners who can afford their services.

“Those jobs exist only because we’ve made the process really difficult,” said Evan Soltas, the Princeton economist who co-authored the paper with Harvard’s Jonathan Gruber. “It’s a sad statement of how hard it's become that this has become its own form of expertise.”

What’s the hold up?

Not all delays are created equal.

If one city is especially slow at turning around a set of building permits, that might reflect the fact that it’s especially tricky to build there. Doing heavy construction around existing buildings and infrastructure is going to be inherently more complicated — and may warrant a finer-tooth regulatory once-over — than building the same thing on an untouched plot of exurban farmland.

In many of California’s large cities “a lot of the work is adjusting and fixing and readapting older buildings, which is much different from building something ground up,” said Andrew Junius, a partner at the Bay Area real estate law firm Reuben, Junius & Rose. “This isn’t like making cookies. Every project is different. Every building is different.”

But a city’s permitting process can also reflect its specific policy choices. In Los Angeles most projects with 50 units or more get an extra vetting by the planning department thanks to a city ordinance from 1990. This can add months, if not years, to the development process, which may explain the high number of 49-unit apartment buildings in the city.

Sluggish approvals can also reflect no policy choice at all. In San Francisco no single entity is responsible for making sure that the various regulatory nodes of government talk to one another.

“It just evolved that way, there was no grand design at the beginning,” said Fred Brousseau, a partner with Harvey M. Rose Associates, a San Francisco consultant company that analyzed the city’s permitting process in a report this spring. Though project delays almost always get blamed on the city, even in cases when the developer is at fault, “it would be useful to have a little more birddogging of the laggard applications,” he said.

A new space for us to fight

Times are changing for California’s expediters.

Once upon a time, whether a housing project progressed or not was left almost entirely to the discretion of California’s local governments and their elected leaders. That made the insidery arts of glad-handing and trading on connections the most prized skills for land use consultants.

But greasing the skids of city government can get dangerously close to greasing palms — a point regularly made by pro-development advocates, small government conservatives and the occasional newspaper editorial board.

In 2021, Walter Wong, maybe California’s most notorious expediter, pleaded guilty in a corruption scandal that shook San Francisco city politics. Among his confessed wrong doings: Showering top permitting officials with international travel in exchange for the snappy approval of a major mixed-use development project.

Overly exuberant expediters have been prosecuted in New York and Washington D.C. In 2024, Los Angeles Councilmember José Huizar was sentenced to 13 years in prison for using his perch atop the city’s powerful Planning and Land Use Management Committee to approve development projects in exchange for cash and other gifts.

Quid pro quo-ing one’s way to project approval isn’t as easy as it used to be.

Houses under construction in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Aug. 5, 2026. The area was severely burned during the Palisades Fire in early 2025.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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The California Legislature has spent the last decade passing a torrent of housing laws designed to override local approval processes like the ones Blackman has developed an expertise in navigating. “Ministerial approval” or “by right” are the terms of statutory art — as in, the act of building an apartment tower in certain urban neighborhoods is now a right enjoyed by developers, not a privilege to be reluctantly dispensed by skeptical council members.

State lawmakers have also passed a series of laws aimed at speeding up, standardizing and outsourcing the building permitting process.

"The political skillset is less important now,” said Michael Hansen, a San Diego consultant who used to serve as the city’s planning director. Rather than attend meetings downtown trying to convince elected officials of the merits of a project, much of his current work is of a more technical nature: Figuring out if and how a given state streamlining law can be applied to a particular project.

“There’s still quite a bit of work trying to get a project to fit within the ministerial box," he said.

Blackman said he can’t remember the last time he had to convince local elected officials to allow a zoning change, which used to be his professional bread and butter. But “I still think there is abundant work in my space for folks like us,” he said.

His job — which in his heart Blackman believes should not exist — appears to be safe for now.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Powerful, hurricane-charged waves may hit Southern California again this weekend, threatening further damage to beachfront homes and the public boardwalk on the Long Beach Peninsula, where crews haven’t had time to rebuild from the last major storm swell.

Hurricane Polo in the southern Pacific could produce tides of up to 7 feet in Long Beach, with waves between 4 and 6 feet, according to forecasters at the National Weather Service. The strongest conditions are expected around 9 a.m. Monday and Tuesday before tapering off that evening.

Forecasters caution they won’t have a firm idea of the storm’s path until Thursday, but in a “worst-case scenario,” the swell could be similar to the one caused by Hurricane Marie, said Devin Black with the NWS. That storm sent waves crashing into the Peninsula, flooding streets, shattering portions of a wooden boardwalk and forcing evacuations at 19 homes along the coast.

Whether Polo reaches that severity depends on how it travels. Black explained that weak steering currents in the atmosphere have some forecasting models showing the storm curving toward Mexico, while others show it tracking farther west — a scenario that would leave Southern California more exposed to swells.

At the right angle, those swells can pass through a gap in Long Beach’s breakwater and jetty, mostly hitting the Peninsula between 62nd and 69th places. Normally this stretch is protected by a reinforced sand berm meant to soften the blows the Peninsula takes from the waves. But Hurricane Marie stripped away so much sand from this area, officials say, that there’s no beachfront left to build it between 62nd and 69th. Because of the damage, “we can’t even get trucks down there to build out the berm,” said City Manager Tom Modica.

Crews will continue to reinforce the berm to the east and west of those cross streets.

City crews, with help from the Conservation Corps, are also replacing damaged sections of boardwalk with plywood while engineers assess its wooden seawall, which was left battered and exposed after waves punctured holes and left some hinges twisted.

A hole in the seawall after strong waves pounded the boards along the Peninsula in Long Beach on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Officials urge homeowners who received sandbags after Marie to keep them in place through this weekend and the winter, when strong waves and flooding could be commonplace because of a supercharged El Niño.

“We are encouraging everyone to do what they need to to protect their private property,” Modica said, adding that the city will be offering more sandbags ahead of this weekend.

Modica said the city hasn’t yet decided whether to issue evacuation orders for homes. “Depends on where the activity is, and what hits, and what the conditions are,” he said. “We will take that kind of as the situation progresses.”

A report due out next week will assess the condition of the city’s seawall, lay out short-term solutions ahead of winter and sketch potential long-term plans for the coastline. Modica said he also hopes to release next week the costs already incurred from Hurricane Marie along with rough estimates for repairs.

Long Beach firefighters survey the damage along the boardwalk after strong waves pounded the Long Beach peninsula on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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The longer-term challenge is restoring the sand stripped from the shoreline.

In light of the coming winter season, the city says it wants to expedite its $9.75 million dredging project that would pull roughly 415,000 cubic yards of sediment from the Alamitos Bay channel to extend the beach by about 260 feet. Expected to start in late October, Modica said he’s hoping to quicken the pace if “even by a few days.”

“We are working to see what we can do to accelerate it as much as possible, if we can get any additional sand,” Modica said, adding that the city is also considering whether future phases could add to that work.

The Long Beach City Council is anticipated to ratify a local emergency order on Tuesday in response to the ongoing threat of El Niño. Modica initiated the process this week, saying one was needed ahead of a “really tough season.”

A truck carrying sand makes its way to pick up another load as crews build sand berms along the Peninsula in Long Beach on Tuesday, Aug 4, 2026.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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The declaration does not close streets or trigger evacuations on its own. Instead, it allows the city to bypass standard procurement and contracting timelines so it can stockpile sandbags, hire additional crews and equipment, and strike agreements with outside agencies without waiting for council approval at each step.

The order also allows Modica to spend up to $1 million through emergency contracts, with his spending reported to the City Council every two weeks. Modica said he’s already eyeing purchases for more sand for sandbags, along with building materials, outside crews for work such as tree removal, and rented water pumps for low-lying intersections across the city. Larger reconstruction projects, he said, would go through the city’s standard contracting and bidding process.

Long Beach’s declaration follows a similar one from Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose office has warned that changing ocean dynamics and El Niño conditions spurred by climate change could bring severe rain, flooding, and taller tides to the region. Forecasters have placed strong odds on a very powerful El Niño this year, with roughly a two-thirds chance it reaches historic strength by year’s end, a threshold that would surpass every event recorded since 1950.

Unusual creatures are visiting Southern California’s coastal waters.

One of them, a sea turtle, nested near Seal Beach last week for the first time in California history.

And they’re here because of El Niño.

Forecasters say there is more than a 90% chance that this year’s El Niño is going to be very strong, and most Southern Californians are bracing for record-high surf and heavy rains that usually come with the climate pattern.

Residents got a taste earlier this month of what could come this fall and winter, when surf from Hurricane Marie caused widespread damage along the Southern California coast.

But the region is also starting to see a lesser-known effect of El Niño: sea creatures that don’t normally live here showing up in our waters.

Scientists say they are following the warm waters that fuel El Niño, which are likely to have a dramatic impact on our marine ecosystems over the course of the season.

“ Animals like a certain range of temperature, just like you're setting the thermostat at home to a certain temperature that you like,” said Bill Ludt, a curator of ichthyology, or the study of fish, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

During an El Niño year, the normally cool waters off the California coast warm significantly. As that happens, animals that normally live in warmer, tropical waters off the coast of Mexico, like sea turtles, move north.

Unusual visitors

The endangered olive ridley sea turtle crawled out of the ocean near Seal Beach on Sept. 16, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It dug a hole and laid its clutch of eggs inside before burying it and shuffling back into the sea.

A turtle was also seen nesting near the Huntington Beach Pier. Officials have fenced off both nesting sites.

The Seal Beach turtle is just one of a number of unusual creatures that have been spotted off the Southern California coast lately.

A whale shark was spotted near the Channel Islands, off the coast of Malibu. There have also been reports of hammerhead sharks and other large fish like mahi mahi and bullet tuna.

Like the turtle, some creatures have never been recorded in California waters before. A fisherman recently caught a longfinned bigeye from the Venice fishing pier, a bright red-orange fish that normally lives off of Mexico and Baja California.

“It is a wide-ranging species, just not typically in California,” Ludt said. “So it will occur in Baja, as well as other parts of the world. But for California, this is a first.”

Ludt and his colleagues at the Natural History Museum collected the longfinned bigeye and are preserving the physical specimen in the museum’s archive.

“We just want to document things that are rare along our coast, as well as the common things,” Ludt said. “Our goal is always to just document life and how it changes over time on our planet.”

According to Ludt, the creatures Southern California is seeing so far are just the beginning of what’s to come this year.

Animals like the sea turtle and the sharks are what scientists call pelagic animals, meaning they live mostly in open oceans, often migrating in search of food.

Ludt said it will take longer for sea life to show up that doesn’t normally migrate over long distances, like smaller fish. He said we could eventually see colorful reef fish, such as damselfish, angelfish or pufferfish, similar to those one might see living among corals in Hawaii.

A yellow-bellied sea snake, recovered from a previous El Niño event, is preserved at the L.A. County Natural History Museum.

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Edgar Chamorro Gonzalez

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Courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

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Sea snakes are also likely to move into our waters. There was a report of a yellow-bellied sea snake washing up at Crystal Cove in Orange County, but scientists have yet to confirm its authenticity.

Yellow-bellied sea snakes have also been seen here during past El Niño events. They are venomous but don’t pose a threat to humans unless handled.

These warm-water animals will likely retreat south, and some may die and wash ashore when waters cool down again later this winter.

Stress on native wildlife

While the newcomers thrive in warm waters, California’s native sea life does not.

The heat can affect their immune system and metabolism. That, in turn, means less food is available for other animals that eat fish, including seals, sea lions and dolphins.

Another danger is algal blooms. Warmer water allows more algae to grow, and at times, the algae can be toxic, especially to marine mammals.

Scientists say these stressors will likely leave some animals sick and stranded.

“They'll beach, and they'll be acting up weirdly, sometimes maybe more aggressively than they normally would,” said Jorge Velez-Juarbe, curator of marine mammals at the L.A. County Natural History Museum.

Velez-Juarbe added that we could also see more deaths of marine mammals over the next few months.

El Niño’s warming trend is also a window into the effects of a changing climate. Velez-Juarbe said it's an example of how ongoing ocean warming due to climate change can affect Southern California’s marine environments.

Thankfully, Velez-Juarbe said it's unlikely El Niño will cause long-term damage to native species populations. They will likely rebound when ocean temperatures fall later this winter.

If you see a sick or stranded animal, the best thing to do is to keep your distance and call authorities. He also recommends reporting the animal to NOAA’s stranded animal hotline at (866) 767-6114.

If you come across an unusual sea creature along the shore, you can also email the team at the Natural History Museum at nature@nhm.org.