Highly Venomous Snake Washes Up on a California Beach
An ordinary day at the beach turned into something much more for a family who stumbled across a “sluggish” snake on the shore. Jackie Aguilar shared her story with CBS News Los Angeles recently, after learning that the snake she and her family rescued may have actually been a highly venomous reptile.
Everything went down on Sept. 11, 2026, when Aguilar told the outlet that she and her family had been visiting Crystal Cove State Beach in Southern California. They had stumbled upon a snake that looked like it was struggling.
Aguilar has grainy cellphone footage of the moment when she scooped the snake up with what appears to be a long palm frond, trying to return it to the water where they assumed it came from. However, it wasn’t until later that she learned that she may have been within feet of what the Australian Museum calls a “highly toxic” venomous snake.
What’s worse is that these snakes typically only pose a danger when they drift ashore, which is exactly what happened when Aguilar’s family spotted the serpent. Fortunately, everyone made it out of the situation unscathed, but now experts are warning that this may be a sign of more dangers ahead.
Aguilar Says She Didn’t Know What Type of Snake It Was Until She Researched It
The woman told CBS News Los Angeles that she initially assumed the snake was harmless until someone told her to look into it. “They’re all telling me like it’s one of the most poisonous ones. And then I started researching it, and I found out it was like the yellow belly one,” she told the outlet.
It looks like the snake was easy enough to identify once Aguilar started her research, thanks to its distinctive yellow belly (hence the name) and flat tail.
This Isn’t the First Time This Snake Has Made an Appearance
In December 2015, Scientific American reported that a yellow-bellied sea snake had washed up on shore in Southern California. According to the report, two of these snakes washed up on shore that year, prompting a lot of speculation from experts.
“North of the tip of Baja [California], we have only five documented observations of this snake ever,” Greg Pauly, assistant curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, told the outlet at the time. “Prior to this year, we only had three.”
El Niño May Be to Blame for the Snakes
Pauly blamed the warmer water associated with El Niño for the snake’s sudden arrival, and he’s not the only one. UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography says that El Niño’s impacts on the ocean’s ecosystem are vast. Not only can the changing temperatures and currents bring subtropical and tropical species to our shores (like the yellow-bellied sea snake), but it can also increase the ocean’s pH.
Experts are predicting that this will be a particularly strong El Niño year, which means that beachgoers could be in for even more surprises. Hopefully, hopefully they all go as smoothly as Aguilar’s encounter.
