California heat wave increases hidden danger lurking beneath beach waters

That’s gotta sting.

An increasing number of stingrays are flooding California’s beaches, lashing unsuspecting beachgoers with venomous barbs found on their tails.

Bolsa Chica and Huntington State Beaches in Orange County have reported more than 3,100 incidents so far this year, twice the total for the whole of 2025, the Associated Press reports.

Huntington Beach has recorded over 2,000 cases so far this year, surpassing the total number of incidents from all of last year.

In San Diego, over 900 stings were reported during the first half of this year, higher than any six-month period in the last five years, according to lifeguard data.

Jake Hemann, a tourist from New Mexico, recently visited Bolsa Chica State Beach and was learning to surf when he got off his board and stepped right on one of the creatures.

“It hurt pretty bad,” Hemann told the Associated Press. “It was radiating up to my ankle.”

When stingrays are stepped on, the creatures flick up their tails, striking people with the venomous barbs along their tails. The venom can cause intense pain, swelling, and even nausea.

Though painful, the stings usually don’t require medical attention, but if swelling continues beyond four or five days, an infection or a retained barb could be the culprit.

Local officials point to higher temps as a possible cause for the increase in rays.

“We’re definitely seeing an increase,” Bryan R. Etnyre, state park superintendent in northern Orange County, told AP. “A lot of it is due to warming ocean temperatures that are consistently staying in the 60s. I don’t think there was a week all winter where we dropped below 60 this year.”

Found along the Pacific coast from NorCal down to Panama, round stingrays tend to move towards the shore during warmer weather.

The rays may be increasing in number due to population loss from species that often hunt them, including sharks, sea lions, and giant bass, Chris Lowe, a professor of marine biology and director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach, told AP.

Lowe says he’s expecting record numbers of rays this year. So many, they’re even covering beaches.

“There can be so many that they actually carpet the bottom, like you can’t see sand,” Lowe said. “During El Niños, we get more of them up from the south, and they come closer to shore. So this year, we’re expecting record numbers.”

Rays are partial to warmer waters. Females prefer it for reproducing, while males love it for boosting their metabolism and helping with hunting.

This year’s “Super El Niño‘, which is seeing ocean temps hit record numbers, could push tiger sharks, bull sharks and venomous snakes not typically found in California towards the state.

“Some of these kinds of interesting oddities that are never a part of California will become part of this temporarily tropical El Niño-heated California,” Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told USA Today.

Lowe says working with television stations to create a stingray advisory to help reduce the number of people stung by the pesky creatures.

Though stingrays may be a nuisance to humans, they are actually good for beaches, eating small clams and adding oxygen to the ocean floor.

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