Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US This is Morris. Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet ( Morus bassanus ) in the entire Pacific Ocean.
The photographer captured a Northern Gannet, Great Blue Heron, and California Brown Pelican in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, California, using a 200‑800mm Canon EF lens. The birds were observed congregating beneath a harbor sign, providing a striking image of wildlife in their natural habitat.
The photograph captures a California Sea Lion and a Brandt's Cormorant at Pillar Point Harbor in California, USA. While the main subjects are the sea lion and cormorant, the image also reveals a Northern Gannet named Morris peeking out from behind a sign’s base. The scene showcases a diverse group of marine wildlife in a harbor setting.
The California Brown Pelican has taken over the Pacifica Pier in San Mateo County, CA, after the pier was shut down in early June due to a cracked concrete walkway that made it unsafe for public access. The pelicans have occupied the area, effectively replacing human use of the pier. The incident highlights how wildlife can quickly reclaim abandoned or unsafe human structures.
arXiv:2607. 26743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has shown considerable potential for archaeological applications, yet its use in zooarchaeology remains limited, particularly for the identification of avian skeletal remains.
arXiv:2608.21281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in field technology have led to a massive influx of in-the-wild video data for ecological science. The primary bottleneck in leveraging...
arXiv:2607. 26238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate lightweight raptor-species classification for real-time edge deployment in wind-turbine collision mitigation.
Simon Willison created a .blend URL Viewer tool that lets users view a Blender model of a Fabergé egg themed after the TV show Pluribus directly in their browser. He generated the egg image using ChatGPT Images 2.5, then fed it to GPT‑6 Astra with a custom Blender skill to produce several .blend files. The viewer, built with JavaScript, is now part of his tools collection for easy access to the resulting 3D model.
arXiv:2606. 00080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Marine plankton underpin aquatic food webs and play a key role in global CO2 sequestration, making reliable species identification critical for understanding ocean health and climate feedbacks.
This paper introduces an automated one‑shot bird call classification pipeline tailored for rare species that lack large training datasets. By leveraging embedding spaces from large bird classification networks and a cosine‑similarity classifier, the system incorporates filtering and denoising steps to detect calls with minimal data. The approach was validated on simulated Xeno‑Canto recordings and on the critically endangered tooth‑billed pigeon, achieving 1.0 recall and 0.95 accuracy. "whyItMatters":"The system enables conservationists to monitor endangered species with only a few recordings, filling a gap left by existing large‑scale classifiers."
The paper presents a method that leverages sparse expert point annotations from historical benthic surveys to improve dense segmentation of marine imagery. By using these points as visual prompts for the SAM2 foundation model and introducing a mechanism to filter out unreliable points, the authors generate high‑quality pseudo‑ground‑truth masks that train more accurate fine‑grained semantic segmentation models. The approach is validated on public benthic datasets and a new benchmark featuring real‑world sparse annotations, aiming to enable scalable ecological analysis.
Det‑LIME is a detector‑aware, multi‑instance adaptation of LIME designed to explain black‑box object detectors used in marine mammal research. It generates instance‑specific, box‑aligned explanations by weighting detections, applying a proximity kernel, and using IoU‑based matching to track instances across perturbations. Evaluated on aerial drone imagery of harbor seals and a seabird case study, Det‑LIME outperformed vanilla LIME, Stabilized LIME, Deterministic LIME, and gradient‑based methods in Attribution Ratio and Max Saliency Hit Rate, offering higher‑resolution, instance‑aware explanations that aid debugging, data augmentation, and modeling improvements.