Science
A Diver Visited a Fallen Whale. When He Returned, It Was Gone.
How does an 18-foot-long, 2,000-pound carcass just disappear?
That question has puzzled some divers and photographers who regularly plunge into the waters off San Diego.
It started earlier this spring when Doug Bonhaus took advantage of some calm weather to scuba dive in Scripps Canyon. As he descended, a hulking mass took shape below him.
There, at an exceptionally shallow 115 feet, lay the body of a baby gray whale.
Whale falls are usually not seen by human divers. Typically, they are discovered by remotely operated vehicles at depths exceeding 3,000 feet.
Local marine biologists had a guess as to the gray whale calf’s origins. An animal that matched what was found on the seafloor had been spotted swimming near La Jolla Shores, desperately searching for its mother. During its final hours, it was seen approaching boats, as though asking for help that wasn’t coming.
Because it was the first time in memory that a fall was so accessible to people, other divers quickly made their way to the site. Among them was Jules Jacobs, an underwater photojournalist who has written for The New York Times about his explorations.
At that point in late January, the carcass’s resting place was a trough in the canyon that required pinpoint precision to reach. So Mr. Jacobs steeled himself for a dangerous and mentally taxing dive.
Navigating the crepuscular gloom with a team of five other divers, the dive lights suddenly illuminated what he was looking for: the mottled-skinned, emaciated calf. The calf’s eyes had already succumbed to the elements; it seemed locked into an expression of sorrow.
“It’s humbling to dive a whale fall where the tail alone is as big as your body,” Mr. Jacobs said.
Mr. Jacobs planned additional dives to observe the animal. On his second visit a week later, a chunk of the animal’s tail was missing, likely the work of scavenger sharks like the seven gill or the mako.
After a surge of spring storms, Mr. Jacobs descended into freezing blackness for the third time in late February. Gripping his camera gear so tightly his knuckles turned white, he waited for the decaying animal to appear.
What he found was only the barren seabed.
The calf was gone.
Gray whales, which can grow to around 45 feet in adulthood, have a migration that is the one of the longest of any mammal. It starts in the balmy seas of Baja California and extends to feeding grounds in the high latitudes of the Arctic Oceans. The calf and its missing mother were most likely headed north before they were separated. During this phase of the journey, they would have been at their most vulnerable, with the mother not having eaten for six months.
Gray whale populations follow a boom-and-bust cycle, with numbers crashing and then recovering, and sometimes up to a quarter of the population lost in a few years.
For about six years, however, the population has failed to rebound as it did during previous die-offs. Scientists attribute this decline to climate change, which accelerates Arctic warming and disrupts the gray whale’s prey. Ship strikes and entanglements in fishing lines aggravate losses to starvation.
“We’re unlikely to return to a world that can support 25,000 gray whales anytime soon,” said Joshua Stewart, an assistant professor at the Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute. Dr. Stewart expects to see many more whales dying on the West Coast.
Still, in the normal course of events, the death of a whale does not always signify an end. Instead, it catalyzes new beginnings.
A riot of life blooms from a whale carcass, even a calf’s. The flesh nourishes scavengers, the bones are colonized by microbes and worms and the curved vertebrae form new highways for a rapidly developing reef.
“A whale fall is a real bonanza and may provide as much food as normally reaches the sediment beneath it in 200 years,” said Craig Smith, professor emeritus of oceanography at the University of Hawaii. “Ironically, we know more about whale-fall communities in the deep sea than in shallow water.”
A whale decays in three ecologically distinct stages. First come the scavengers — sharks, crabs, hagfish — which tear into the soft tissue. Then, along come the worms in “huge, writhing masses in the organic-rich ooze surrounding the carcass,” Dr. Smith said. This can last seven years in what scientists call the enrichment-opportunist stage.
Finally, bacteria deep within the bones produce hydrogen sulfide, fueling the chemosynthetic bacteria on the surface of the bones and those living symbiotically inside animal hosts. This stage can last decades, with more than 200 marine species thriving on a single whale fall.
But this infant whale and its carcass had vanished. Had something or someone made off with it, preventing that life-sustaining whale fall from continuing?
Gregory Rouse, a marine biology professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, believes the explanation is less mysterious. During whale falls, he said, decomposition in the body cavity generates gas, which can cause the carcass to rise again after initially sinking, and float before eventually settling on the bottom.
Strong winds and pulsing currents likely swept the body deeper into the canyon, which descends as far as 1,600 feet down.
“This animal would’ve grown into a titan, but its life was snuffed out in infancy,” Mr. Jacobs said.
But where it lies quietly in the darkness, new life may proliferate and prosper.
The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services has joined a chorus of California hospitals and health systems lobbying the state for a $500-million emergency payment to public hospitals bracing for massive financial losses.
The California Assn. of Public Hospitals and Health Systems is requesting a one-time general fund payment in the 2026-27 budget to help cover inpatient care for fee-for-service Medi-Cal patients at the state’s 17 public hospitals.
While the exact percentage of the $500 million allocated to each hospital will depend on inpatient claims, the county expects that roughly 25%, or $125 million, will end up at Los Angeles County hospitals, said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director of LA Health Services.
“That’s the money that is really necessary to serve as a stopgap and continue that lifeline that the public hospitals desperately need, particularly with the state’s proposed shift of undocumented individuals from managed care into fee-for-service,” Ghaly said.
Ghaly praised county voters for passing Measure ER, which will provide an estimated $220 million annually for the next five years to the county health system through a new half-cent sales tax, Ghaly said.
But it’s not enough to stanch what the county estimates will be a $700-million annual loss by the 2028-29 fiscal year.
LA Health Services is the largest public health system in the state and second-largest in the nation. It serves as a safety net for the county’s 10 million residents, providing healthcare regardless of an individual’s ability to pay.
More than 80% of the system’s patients rely on Medi-Cal, Los Angeles General Medical Center Chief Executive Jorge Orozco told a state Senate committee in March.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed into law last summer, alters Medicaid eligibility requirements and includes about $1 trillion in federal Medicaid reductions over 10 years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. As a result, California is expected to lose tens of billions in total funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.
About 660,000 people in Los Angeles County are expected to lose Medi-Cal coverage, “but they will not stop needing healthcare,” Orozco said in March. “They will still come to our emergency rooms for everything from routine illness to life threatening conditions. And safety net hospital systems like ours will be forced to absorb those costs.”
County health officials have enacted hiring freezes, consolidated services, reduced overtime and taken other cost-cutting measures in anticipation of the losses, resulting in about $230 million in savings.
“But we need to be clear: we cannot cut our way out of a funding loss of this magnitude,” the department said in a statement released this week. “Without help from the State, we will be forced to consider options no one wants, reduced patient services, staff layoffs, and potential facility closures.”
The county has not yet identified specific services for closure, Ghaly said.
“Our focus is entirely on preventing the harm that would come before we have to make those tough choices,” she added.
A memo on the department’s fiscal outlook prepared for the Board of Supervisors sounded the alarm in April.
“For the patients we serve, losing Medi-Cal doesn’t mean they stop getting sick — it means losing access to care. Health Services will still be here, but with over 600,000 more uninsured patients in LA County alone, the strain will be felt across our health system and across every emergency room in Los Angeles County,” the memo read.
“Without substantial new revenue sources, Health Services will have no alternative but to consider planning for service curtailments — including possible facility closures and staff layoffs — beginning in early 2027.”
new video loaded: Southern Lights Seen From International Space Station
By Cynthia Silva
June 10, 2026
Science
UC Davis favored less qualified Black, Latino med school applicants, Justice Department claims
The U.S. Justice Department has accused the UC Davis School of Medicine of choosing race “over merit, skill, and competence” in its admissions process, favoring Black and Latino students even when they weren’t as qualified as white and Asian applicants.
The department said its findings, announced Wednesday afternoon, were based on a six-month investigation by its Civil Rights Division. The Justice Department said it found that the Northern California university violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-based determinations in admissions. The findings have been contested by the school.
“Davis Med’s actions reflect both unabashed contempt for the rule of law and plain disregard for the potential public health consequences of putting race over merit, skill, and competence,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
“The Department will not allow schools to violate federal law without consequence.”
A spokesperson said the university was “disappointed” with the report and its findings.
“UC Davis School of Medicine strongly disagrees with any characterization of its admissions practices as discriminatory or inconsistent with applicable law,” a school statement read. “The report’s findings do not accurately reflect the school’s rigorous, individualized, and merit-based admissions process and our firm commitment to complying with applicable federal and state antidiscrimination laws.”
The department outlined its case in a 12-page letter to an attorney representing UC Davis, claiming the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.
Title VI prohibits institutions receiving federal funding from discriminating based on race, while the 2023 decision banned affirmative action in higher-education admissions.
The Justice Department said its investigation found the medical school “adopted admissions practices with the express purpose of circumventing” the 2023 ruling.
That method was the “Davis Scale,” the department said. The letter called the scale a “continuous measure of socioeconomic disadvantage” that includes parental income and education, growing up in a medically underserved area and other socioeconomic variables.
The Justice Department included UC Davis literature that said the scale had allowed the school to triple the enrollment of Black and Latino students.
In 2024, Davis’ medical school became the third most racially diverse medical school in the country, the Justice Department claimed.
Conversely, the department said its review of medical school admissions data from 2023 to 2025 found that 93% of white and certain Asian applicants had MCAT scores at or above those of the average Black student.
It also showed that Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted at rates up to six times higher than whites and Asians, despite consistently having, on average, lower academic qualifications, according to the department.
The Justice Department said it is attempting to enter into a voluntary agreement with UC Davis to bring the medical school into compliance. The department would eventually sue the medical school if such a resolution is not found.
UC Davis did not indicate whether it would comply with the Justice Department.
“UC Davis is fully committed to meeting the critical healthcare needs of California, particularly those in underserved and under-resourced areas,” the school said in a statement.
The finding mirrors similar investigations into medical schools at UCLA and UC San Diego.
The Justice Department said last month that UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine intentionally used race for the last three years to discriminate against white and Asian applicants during admissions.
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