{"id":381609,"date":"2026-07-01T02:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T02:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/381609\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T02:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T02:56:12","slug":"why-this-elephant-seal-turned-bright-purple-in-smc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/381609\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Elephant Seal Turned Bright Purple In SMC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The incident follows an unusual few months for the famous elephant seal colony. Earlier this year, the park temporarily closed portions of its seal viewing area after highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, was <a href=\"https:\/\/patch.com\/california\/pacifica\/highly-infectious-bird-flu-confirmed-bay-area-elephant-seals\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">confirmed in northern elephant seals<\/a> for the first time in California. The outbreak infected dozens of elephant seals before ending in March.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/patch.com\/california\/novato\/purple-waves-are-crashing-marin-county-beach-heres-why\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Another colorful natural phenomenon<\/a> has also been attracting attention along the Bay Area coast this year. In Marin County, beaches have recently been covered by blooms of purple, jelly-like sea snails known as violet snails, which wash ashore when winds and currents push them toward land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The incident follows an unusual few months for the famous elephant seal colony. Earlier this year, the park&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-381609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}