Welcome to the first in our new Beach Creatures series — your no-stress, parent-friendly guide to the weird and wonderful stuff your kids will inevitably find (and try to touch) on the sand from Marina del Rey to Santa Monica.

If you've spent any time on the beach with kids around here, you know the drill. You're walking the tideline, coffee in hand, and someone shrieks "WHAT IS THAT??" while pointing at a blob glistening in the sand.

We're starting a little series to help you ID the common stuff, know what's safe to touch, and turn "ewww" into a teaching moment. First up: those jelly blobs everyone asks about.

That see-through, squishy, jellyfish-looking lump? Almost always a salp. They're clear, barrel-shaped little sea creatures that drift around the open ocean and get pushed onto our beaches by wind and currents.

Salps look like jellyfish but they're totally NOT. No tentacles, no stingers, nothing. And weirdly, they're actually more closely related to humans than to jellyfish.

See a little orange or dark dot inside? That's just their digestive system!

Safe to touch? Yep. Zero stinging cells, so they're fine for kids and dogs to poke at. They're basically 97% seawater — nature's little water balloon. Heads up tho: once they're stranded they're already dying and super fragile, so don't bother taking one home — let it be.

You've probably also seen the bright blue, oval guys with a little clear sail on top. Different critter — those are Velella velella, aka "by-the-wind sailors." They show up on SoCal beaches every spring, sometimes in the thousands.

These ARE distant cousins of jellyfish and the Portuguese man o' war, but the sting is super weak and mostly harmless to people. The rule: hold 'em by the sail, not the bottom, and don't rub your eyes after. For little hands, easier to just look and not touch.

Real jellyfish do show up too, and sometimes what you find is just the leftover clear "dome" of a dead moon jelly — the stiff, glassy jelly that gives it structure. If you spot a blob with faint tentacles or a four-leaf-clover shape in the middle, that's more likely a jelly than a salp. When in doubt, the safe move is always look, don't grab.

Both salps and velella are at the mercy of the wind and currents. When there's a big bloom of phytoplankton (their food) out in the ocean, their numbers explode — and the right winds push them right onto our shore. It happens most in spring and early summer, so if you're seeing a bunch right now, totally normal.