The SciSchmooze
Kishore Hari
17 August 2026
A love letter to the wildest place in the Bay Area, written from inside a fog bank.
Greetings, science fans!
It is Fogust in San Francisco, and I have not seen the sun in what feels like several geological epochs. Karl has taken up permanent residence. Gray has been replaced by different shades of gray.
This weekend, I took a walk out by Ocean Beach, squinting through the mist, knowing that somewhere out there, the Farallon Islands are doing extraordinary things without me.
I have never been. Most people haven’t. The islands are closed to the public and accessible only to the small crew of researchers from Point Blue Conservation Science who have maintained a continuous presence on Southeast Farallon Island since 1968.
But I have spent an unreasonable amount of time reading and watching accounts from the lucky few who have made the boat trip out. Their stories tend to include the same things: the 2.5-hour crossing through notoriously rough seas, the moment the islands suddenly appear out of the fog, and, before anything else, the smell.
Elephant seals. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds. Decades of accumulated biological activity on a small rocky island with nowhere for any of it to go. People describe the smell with a kind of reverent horror. One journalist wrote that she smelled the seals before she saw them.
Then there are the sounds.
Western gulls shrieking from their nests. Hundreds of thousands of common murres making a strange, kazoo-like call that carries across the water. Sea lions grunting from the rocks in such numbers that the sound reverberates off the surrounding islands.
And then there is the sheer scale of the place. The Farallones are home to the largest seabird nesting colony in the contiguous United States, with roughly half a million birds representing 13 species. At the peak of spring breeding season, more than 300,000 common murres nest there alone.
The science coming out of this improbable place is pretty extraordinary, too. Because Point Blue has had researchers there continuously since 1968, the Farallones have produced one of the longest-running wildlife datasets in the American West, tracking population numbers, diet, and reproductive success across seabirds, seals, sea lions, and white sharks.
Each fall, somewhere between 15 and 50 great white sharks arrive after their annual migration across the Pacific. And they are there for a very specific reason: young northern elephant seals, arriving at the islands for the first time after their first summer at sea, fattened up and blissfully unaware of what is waiting below. Point Blue researchers typically see the first predation event in late August, with numbers increasing through September and peaking in October.
In 2023, global sea surface temperatures reached record highs, while a prolonged El Niño pushed temperatures around the Farallones a couple of degrees above the long-term average. Some seabirds responded by delaying breeding, laying fewer eggs, or abandoning nests altogether, essentially deciding to keep the resources for themselves rather than spend them raising chicks. As we brace for one of the strongest El Niño events ever seen, I wonder what that means for the future of the tiny islands.
On Wednesday evening at the San Mateo Public Library, Gerry McChesney, Refuge Manager with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, will talk about the islands’ history, wildlife, and management. For most of us, it is about as close as we’re going to get to one of the most extraordinary wild places on Earth, sitting just over the horizon from our own backyard.
If you want to get a little closer, the Oceanic Society has been running full-day whale-watching trips to the Farallon Islands since 1972. They leave from San Francisco on weekends from April through December aboard their 60-foot vessel, the Salty Lady. Shark Stewards and Marin Audubon also run trips in the fall, timed to the return of the great whites.
You can’t set foot on the islands, but you can get close enough to see the murres, elephant seals, and, if you’re lucky, the sharks. And yes, you can smell it.
-Kishore
My picks for the week:
- Popping the Science Bubble: Tracking viruses in wastewater (Tuesday, August 18, Berkeley Public Library)
- The Ethics of Making Babies: Genetic Selection and Gene Editing (Wednesday, August 19, Manny’s, San Francisco)
- The Mystical & Bountiful Farallon Islands (Wednesday, August 19, San Mateo Public Library)
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