Every year strange things wash ashore, and 2021 was no exception. A new report details 11 different oddities that arrived on the beach, from the size of a truck to small weird objects like the toxic tarball pictured above. The balls, which appeared at the Sharon beach national park north of Tel Aviv back in February, were the result of an oil spill in the Mediterranean. Unusually stormy conditions in the sea turned oil slicks into blobs of congealed oil that unleashed toxic fumes when they arrived onshore.
A so-called "river monster," the 10 ft.-long arapaima native to the Amazon River, washed up dead in Florida near the Gulf of Mexico; while the much larger basking shark, some 26 ft.-long arrived on the coast of Maine back in January. Meanwhile, what observers perhaps thought was a tangle of yellow rope on a Texas beach turned out to be a species of sea whip coral.
The remains of a 100 lb. moonfish with bright orange and red scales surprised passersby at an Oregon beach in July. The creature was far from its native habitat in waters off California and Hawaii. And one of the most curious sightings was of a fish trapped inside a translucent jellyfish at a Cornwall beach over in the UK back in August. View images and the full list at Live Science.