A man was bitten by a shark Friday when fishing in Stillwater Cove near Pebble Beach in Monterey County, sheriff's officials said.

The man was spear-fishing when he was attacked by the shark, suffering massive blood loss, sheriff's officials said. Two off-duty sheriff's deputies luckily were also fishing in the cove and they took care of the man, as did an on-duty deputy summoned to the scene.

One of the deputies on the scene, trained in emergency field medicine, applied a tourniquet to the man's leg, stopping the blood loss, sheriff's officials said.

Those out for a stroll along the Causeway coast yesterday afternoon were in for a shock, after a six-metre long whale washed up on the beach.

A member of the public reported the sighting to the Coleraine Coastguard on Friday afternoon at Runkerry Strand, near the town of Portballintrae.

Personnel from the coastguard investigated the sighting and unfortunately, on arrival, the animal was already dead.

The whale carcass will now be examined by the Environment Agency before it is removed by the council.

There are unconfirmed reports that the mammal may be a Minke Whale.

One of the more hopeful ecological stories of recent years - the slow restoration of numbers of the North Atlantic right whale - has taken a disastrous turn for the worse. Marine biologists have found their population has plunged abruptly in the past few years and that there may now only be around 100 reproductively mature females left in the sea. Many scientists fear the species could soon become the first great whale to become extinct in modern times.

The principal cause for the North Atlantic right whale's precipitous decline has been the use of increasingly heavy commercial fishing gear dropped on to the sea bed to catch lobsters, snow crabs and hogfish off the east coast of North America. Whales swim into the rope lines attached to these sea-bed traps and their buoys and become entangled. In some cases hundreds of metres of heavy rope, tied to traps weighing more than 60kg, have been found wrapped around whales. "We have records of animals carrying these huge loads - which they cannot shake off - for months and months," said Julie van der Hoop, of Aarhus University in Denmark.

"In some cases they have to burn more than 25,000 calories a day to carry these great weights around with them. Some whales die. In other cases, divers have been able to free them but the whales are often left very thin and undernourished. As a result, they cannot reproduce."

The North Atlantic right whale, Eubalaena glacialis, derives its name from the fact that early whalers considered them to be the "right" whales to hunt - they are slow swimmers, linger in coastal waters and float after being killed. Vast numbers were slaughtered across the Atlantic, with only a few pods surviving along the east coast of the United States and Canada. Numbers dropped - possibly to a population as low as 100 - until in 1935 it was declared illegal to hunt them.

Had Hema Devi paid heed to warnings of forest officials in Uttarakhand's Tanakpur, not to venture into the jungle to collect fodder and firewood following reports that a suspected man-eater was on the prowl in the area, she would been alive today.

Hema Devi, a forest villager, was mauled to death by a tiger on Wednesday afternoon inside the forest where she had gone to collect fodder, allegedly disregarding the warnings.

Despite reports of the presence of the big cat in the area, women from surrounding villages entered the forest twice every day to collect firewood and fodder.

On Wednesday morning officials asked the women not venture into the forest, warning them about the presence of the suspected man-eater.

In a video provided by the forest department, two officials--Nirmal Khulbe and Kailash Bisht-- are heard asking the women not to venture into the forest.

Thousands of dead fish have washed up at a river on the Kapiti Coast , leaving local fishermen bemused.

But the Council insists there's nothing fishy about the large-scale stranding.

Newshub spoke to local whitebaiter Swanny, who said he's never seen anything like the amount of Smelt fish that washed up at the Otaka riverbed earlier this week.

He said he's been coming to the river for more than 60 years.

"You catch a lot of Smelt in November in your net. It might be four or five dozen at a time sort of thing, so you just tip them back. But I've never seen nothing like this - this is one out of the books," he said.

A man died after being attacked by several pit bulls on Thanksgiving night in North Philadelphia, according to Philadelphia Police and media reports. Additionally, one of the attacking dogs was shot and killed by a police officer.

Police said the incident occurred at about 9:06 p.m. on the 1300 block of West Pike Street in North Philadelphia.

Police said a responding officer shot the dog, which died as a result of the shooting.

The victim, whose identity has not been released, was taken to Temple University Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 10:18 p.m., police said.

Pennsylvania and other northern states could be in the path of another big influx of snowy owls from the tundra of the Arctic again this winter.

Indications are building that many of the large owls, referred to by the code SNOW by licensed bird-banders, according to Project SNOWstorm, a snowy owl-tracking organization run in part through the Millersburg-based Ned Smith Center of Nature and Art.

The same four-year, boom cycle of lemmings - preferred prey of the owls - and snowy owls in northern Quebec that preceded the 2013-14 mass irruption of snowy owls south into the U.S. It was an irruption of snowy owls beyond any witnessed since the 1920s, or maybe the 1890s,

And, just as in 2013-14, many snowy owls have already turned up this year in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. A few have been confirmed in Pennsylvania. According to Scott Weidensaul, one of the directors of Project SNOWstorm, in the past few days there's been an unconfirmed sighting reported in Dauphin County.

The big cat reportedly entered a railway station in the city and was "terrorising passengers".

The animal was shot by circus staff, police said. A tram line had been closed while the animal was at large.

No further details were immediately available.

"He had entered a railway station, leading to its closure," said an eyewitness who lives nearby.

"There were fears that the tiger would hurt railway passengers around the Garigliano Bridge. That's where he was cornered and then shot dead."

The alarm was raised at 5.50pm and armed police rushed to the scene, together with the tigers' owners.

Finches in the Galapagos Islands have evolved into a new species, marking the first time such an evolution has been observed by scientists.

A population of finches on the Daphne Major island in the Galapagos has been undergoing changes over the past few decades, thanks to species hybridisation.

The finches are part of a group of 15 species known as Darwin's finches, which helped Charles Darwin with his discovery of the process of evolution through natural selection.

Training his binoculars on something white he saw in the Black Pond in Pleasant View on Wednesday, David Aylward was surprised when an American white pelican came into view.

He had seen the aquatic birds with the big beaks during vacations in Florida before, but never anywhere near his Pleasant View home.

And while an internet search soon confirmed such sightings were rare for P.E.I., Aylward chuckled that one of those sightings was in the Souris area, in a body of water also called Black Pond.

Aylward believes the bird is healthy, just a few thousand kilometers off course.

"He's moving around; he's flying," he reported.