The Wildlife Trusts, which comprises 46 individual wildlife trusts around the country, reports record numbers of more than 800 sightings of whales, dolphins and seals in the waters of the United Kingdom in 2019.

Its Yorkshire project reported hundreds of individual sightings by trained citizen scientists. Among these were a pod of bottlenose dolphins making their way from Scotland to Flamborough Head in East Yorkshire-the farthest south they had been officially identified.

Lunge-feeding humpback whales plunge into dense schools of small fish to feed on them. However, these small fish tend to be pretty fast. So, just how do huge whales sneak up on such speedy prey if they are as huge and overbearing as a ... well, whale?

This question became the focus of a study at Stanford University. Its findings was subsequently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

For the study, an international team led by researchers at KAUST's Red Sea Research Center collected a total of 88 mucus samples from the back and gill skins with lesions as well as from healthy skins of 44 wild-caught blacktip reef sharks caught in the wild around the Seychelles Islands.

Researchers sequenced the samples to identify the bacteria present in them, then compared the samples from the different sharks and tested them to detect changes in response to injuries.