Photograph of a seal sitting on the kayak launch at 72nd Street and Riverside Park by Eric Carvin/AP Earlier this week, iReport had a video of a really cute harbor seal spotted off Red Hook [Via Brownstoner] - the video is below (it's an auto-play and it's seriously awww-worthy)! Besides being ridiculously cute, the video brings back a flood of memories of various seal sighting in the city. There was Gowana, the harp seal......

That shark that washed up on Rockaway Beach yesterday and briefly caused lifeguards to close the beach was not much of a threat. The shark, which seems to have beached itself, was pushed back into the water by a beachgoer and was seen swimming offshore for about an hour afterwards. WCBS reports that, according to an Animal Department Supervisor at the New York Aquarium, the shark was a thresher shark, not known for attacking......

Sad news about Sludgie the whale: The baby minke whale, who captivated our attention as he frolicked in the Gowanus Bay, died yesterday afternoon. He beached himself near Clinton Street around 5PM. The Riverhead Foundation's rescue program had been monitoring the whale and did not believe he was in trouble when he first appeared yesterday, since he seemed to be swimming normally. Rescue director Kim Durham told WCBS 2, "it suddenly began heavy splashing,......

Yesterday, WNBC's Chopper 4 captured footage of a minke whale swimming in the Gowanus Canal Bay. Minke whales are a suborder of baleen whales, which rise to the surface the way this whale does. Chopper 4 reporter Dan Rice told us, "It was hard to see the whale under water because it is so brown. But about every 60 to 90 seconds it would surface for air and dive again." He added, "Almost looked like......

"Look at them, they're like bags of meat. They're huge." That's Paul L. Sieswerda, the curator of the New York Aquarium, talking about the packs of seals (schools of seals? passels of seals?) that have been coming down to "winter" on Hoffman and Swinburne Islands in NY Harbor (Forgotton-NY has the story on the islands). The big guys were first noticed back in the harbor in 2001 after decades of absence. Since then the......

Last weekend, Newsday had a story about a baby harbor seal that was sick and possibly lost. Like many a Manhattanite at 1AM, the male pup was stranded in Brooklyn. The Riverhead Foundation took him in, after making sure he was really lost and/or abandoned by his mother, versus "just sunning himself as he waited for his mother." The six week old seal was responding to initial treatment, but Gothamist would love Newsday to......

Dead bodies, oildrums, garbage from 1964, these are things that you'd expect to find in the Gowanus Canal. But not a harp seal. The Times reports on the 1 year-old harp seal who has defied the laws of science by living and apparently surviving in the Gowanus. The president of the Gowanus Industrial Park, John Quadrozzi Jr. (who calls the waters of the Gowanus "pretty disgusting") saw the seal when it emerged, hurt and......