Nate Rott

Beach surveys are conducted the first week of every month in Southern California.

Volunteers and scientists like Tammy Russell walk sandy beaches looking for bodies.

Russell is an ornithologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

And she says for months they've been seeing a spike in dead seabirds.

Hormorants, myrrhs, grebes, pelicans.

Temperatures have been 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal along most of the California coast since winter, disrupting food webs.

And with an El Nino likely in the months ahead, more heat may be on the horizon.

Nate Rott, NPR News.

Yeah.

One of the things that's kind of wild about this whole story, Emily, is that like very much like the human wars that are going on in the world right now, there is now cell phone footage of these conflicts happening.

Hey, Emily.

So you've been talking to some of these researchers watching this unfold.

I have.

Yeah.

Including the primatologist who took that video.

His name is Aaron Sandell.

And he originally went to study this group of chimpanzees to try and better understand friendship in primates.

Totally.

I mean, Aaron says he'll probably spend the rest of his career trying to understand this ongoing event because it is super rare.

Like, scientists know that some other animals engage in coordinated attacks against each other, like what we might call war, right?