Science
A retired teacher found some seahorses off Long Beach. Then he built a secret world for them
Rog Hanson emerges from the coastal waters, pulls a diving regulator out of his mouth and pushes a scuba mask down around his neck.
“Did you see her?” he says. “Did you see Bathsheba?”
On this quiet Wednesday morning, a paddle boarder glides silently through the surf off Long Beach. Two stick-legged whimbrels plunge their long curved beaks into the sand, hunting for crabs.
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But Hanson, 68, is enchanted by what lies hidden beneath the water. Today he took a visitor on a tour of the secret world he built from palm fronds and pine branches at the bottom of the bay: his very own seahorse city.
The visitor confirms that she did see Bathsheba, an 11-inch-long orange Pacific seahorse, and a grin spreads across Hanson’s broad face.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” he says. “She’s our supermodel.”
If you get Hanson talking about his seahorses, he’ll tell you exactly how many times he’s seen them (997), who is dating whom, and describe their personalities with intimate familiarity. Bathsheba is stoic, Daphne a runner. Deep Blue is chill.
He will also tell you that getting to know these strange, almost mythical beings has profoundly affected his life.
“I swear, it has made me a better human being,” he says. “On land I’m very C-minus, but underwater, I’m Mensa.”
Hanson is a retired schoolteacher, not a scientist, but experts say he probably has spent more time with Pacific seahorses, also known as Hippocampus ingens, than anyone on Earth.
“To my knowledge, he is the only person tracking ingens directly,” says Amanda Vincent, a professor at the University of British Columbia and director of the marine conservation group Project Seahorse. “Many people love seahorses, but Roger’s absorption with them is definitely distinctive. There’s a degree of warm obsession there, perhaps.”
Rog Hanson keeps watch over a small colony of Pacific seahorses.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Over the last three years, Hanson has made the two-hour trek from his home in Moreno Valley to the industrial shoreline of Long Beach to visit his “kids” about every five days. To avoid traffic, he often leaves at 2 a.m. and then sleeps in his car when he arrives.
He keeps three tanks of air and his scuba gear in the trunk of his 2009 Kia Rio. A toothbrush and a pair of pink leopard print reading glasses rest on the dash.
Hanson makes careful notes after all his dives in a colorful handmade log book he stores in a three-ring binder. On this Wednesday he dutifully records the water temperature (62 degrees), the length of the dive (58 minutes), the greatest depth (15 feet) and visibility (3 feet), as well as the precise location of each seahorse. His notes also include phase of the moon, the tidal currents and the strength of the UV rays.
“Scientists will tell you that sunlight is an important statistic to keep down,” he says.
He has given each of his four seahorses a unique logo that he draws with markers in his log book. Bathsheba’s is a purple star outlined in red, Daphne’s is a brown striped star in a yellow circle.
Rog Hanson makes careful notes after all his dives. He has given each of his four seahorses a unique logo.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
He’s learned that the seahorses don’t like it when he hovers nearby for too long. Now he limits his interactions with them to 15 to 30 seconds at a time.
“At first I bugged them too much,” he says. “I was the paparazzi swimming around.”
Hanson traces the origins of his seahorse story back nearly two decades to the early morning of Dec. 30, 2000.
He was diving solo off Shaw’s Cove in Laguna Beach when a slow-moving giant emerged from the abyss. It was a gray whale whose 40-foot frame cast Hanson in shadow.
The whale could have killed him with a flick of its tail, Hanson says, but he felt no fear. The two made eye contact and, as Hanson tells it, he felt the whale’s gaze peering directly into his soul.
It was all over in 10 seconds, but Hanson was altered. He had always wanted to live at the beach, but after this encounter, he vowed to make it happen. It took years —15, in fact — but he finally got a job as a special education teacher in the Long Beach public school system. He bought a van and parked it on Ocean Boulevard. He lived at the beach and dived every day for 3½ months before moving to Moreno Valley.
To amuse himself while he lived at the beach, he built an underwater city he called Littleville out of discarded toys he found at the bottom of the bay.
Hanson saw his first seahorse in January 2016 while checking on Littleville. It was bright orange, just 4.5 inches long, and Hanson, who had logged over a thousand dives in the area, knew it didn’t belong there.
Daphne is one of the seahorses that Rog Hanson is studying in Alamitos Bay.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
The range of the Pacific seahorse is generally thought to extend from Peru to as far north as San Diego. This seahorse ended up about 100 miles north of that.
Scientists said the seahorse and others that joined her had probably ridden an unusual pulse of warm water up the coast, along with other animals generally found in southern waters.
“We were getting a lot of weird sightings in the fall of 2015,” says Sandy Trautwein, vice president of husbandry at the Aquarium of the Pacific. “There was a yellow-bellied sea snake, bluefin tuna, marlin, whale sharks — a lot of animals associated with warm water.”
Most of these animals eventually left after ocean temperatures returned to normal, but Hanson’s seahorses stayed.
That may be because Hanson had built them a home.
It happened like this: In June 2016 he watched in horror as more than 100 high school football players splashed in the shallow waters, right where his seahorses usually hung out.
“I thought, I gotta do something, I gotta do something,” he says.
“On land I’m very C-minus, but underwater, I’m Mensa.”
— Rog Hanson
Then he remembered that, back in the Midwest where he grew up, he used to help the city park service make “fish cribs.” In early spring they would use brush and twigs to build what looked like a miniature log cabin with no roof on an ice-covered lake. When the ice melted, the cribs would fall to the bottom, creating a habitat for fish and other animals.
“So I said to myself, build them a city that’s deeper, where feet can’t get to it even at low tide,” Hanson says.
And he did.
By July 2016 two pairs of seahorses had moved into the new habitat. Daphne, the runner, was named after the nymph from Greek mythology who flees Apollo, Kenny’s name came from the proprietor of a local kayaking company. “Bathsheba” was inspired by a Bible story, and her mate, Deep Blue, named after a dive shop that has helped sponsor Hanson’s work since he launched his seahorse study.
He’s seen Kenny’s and Deep Blue’s bellies swell with pregnancy and noted how their partners check in on them daily, frequently standing sentinel nearby. He’s visited the fish at odd hours to see how their behavior changes from morning to night. And he mourned when Kenny disappeared in January. He still hasn’t come back. (A new member, CD Street, arrived June 29.)
“It feels like I’m reading a book, the book of their life, and I can’t put it down,” he says.
He’s also reached out to seahorse scientists across the globe to compare notes. “I won’t say I know the most about seahorses in the world, but I know the people who do,” he says.
Amanda Vincent, the director of Project Seahorse, says that seahorses spark an emotional reaction in almost everyone.
Daphne is one of the seahorses that Rog Hanson is studying in Alamitos Bay. Hanson and Ashley Arnold keep watch over a small colony of Pacific seahorses.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
“Remember those books with three flaps where you can mix the head of a giraffe with the body of a snake and the tail of a monkey? That’s what we’ve got here,” she says. “They appeal to the sense of fancy and wonder in us.”
When Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, recently discovered a moon orbiting Neptune, he named it Hippocamp in part because of his love of seahorses.
“I’ve seen them in the wild and they are marvelously strange and interesting,” he says. “It’s a fish, but it doesn’t look anything like a fish.”
Pacific seahorses are among the largest members of the seahorse family. Males can grow up to 14 inches long, while females generally top out at about 11. They come in a variety of colors, including orange, maroon, brown and yellow. They are talented camouflagers that can alter the color of their exoskeleton to blend into their environment.
“I won’t say I know the most about seahorses in the world, but I know the people who do.”
But perhaps their most distinguishing characteristic is that they are the only known species in the animal kingdom to exhibit a true male pregnancy. Females deposit up to 1,500 eggs in the male’s pouch. The males incubate the eggs, providing nutrition and oxygen for the growing embryos. When the larval seahorses are ready to be released, he goes into labor — scientists call it “jackknifing” — pushing his trunk toward his tail.
After three years of observation, Hanson has collected new evidence about seahorse mating practices. His research suggests that although most seahorses are monogamous, a female will mate with two males if there are no other female seahorses around.
He also found that males, who are in an almost constant state of pregnancy, tend to stick to an area about the size of a king-size mattress, while the females roam up to 150 feet from their home during a typical day.
Eventually, he may be able to help scientists answer another long-standing question: What is the lifespan of Pacific seahorses in the wild? Some researchers say about five years; others think it could be up to 12.
“It will be interesting to see what Roger finds out,” Vincent says.
In June 2017, about one year after Hanson began formally tracking the seahorses, he took on a partner: a young scuba instructor named Ashley Arnold.
Arnold, who has short red hair and a jocular vibe, is a former Army staff sergeant who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. She learned to dive as part of a program the Salt Lake City Veterans Affairs hospital offered to female veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and military sexual trauma. Arnold suffered from both. Diving became her salvation.
Dive instructor Ashley Arnold is a former Army staff sergeant who says that diving at least twice a week helps her deal with PTSD and MST.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
“All the irritation on the surface disappears when you go under the water,” she says. “It’s like, ‘What was I concerned about?’ You forget about everything else. Nothing else matters.”
She used her GI Bill to pay for a scuba instructor course and to set up her own business. Now, she finds that if she dives at least twice a week and has a dog, she does not need to take medication.
“All the irritation on the surface disappears when you go under the water.”
— Ashley Arnold
“That’s a pretty big statement in my opinion,” she says.
Arnold and Hanson met in June 2016 on a dive trip to Catalina. Hanson mentioned his seahorses. Arnold was intrigued, but still lived in Salt Lake City.
One year later, Arnold moved to Huntington Beach and gave Hanson a call.
“I said, ‘Hey Roger, let’s chat. Any chance I could join you at the seahorses you talked about?’” she says. “And he decided I was acceptable.”
Now, Arnold and her boyfriend, Jake Fitzgerald, check in on the seahorses about once a week and help Roger rebuild the city he created for them.
Rog Hanson, 68, teamed up with dive instructor Ashley Arnold two years ago to keep watch over a small colony of Pacific seahorses.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
“We call them our kids because we love them so much,” Arnold says.
Hanson and Arnold are very protective of their seahorse family. They tell visitors to remove GPS tags from their photos. They swear them to secrecy.
There is little chance anyone would find Hanson’s seahorses without a guide. Also, diving in these waters off Long Beach can be a challenge.
The water is shallow. It’s hard to get your buoyancy right. A misplaced flipper kick can stir up blinding sand and silt.
But if Hanson wants to show you his underwater world, nothing will stop him. He will hold you firmly by the hand and guide you down to the forest he built at the bottom of the bay.
Ashley Arnold, right, gets rinsed off with a hose by Rog Hanson after a dive Alamitos Bay.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
He will use a plastic tent stake, jabbing it into the bottom to propel himself — and you holding on — across the ocean floor. When he spots a seahorse he will use the stake as a pointer. Through the murky water you strain to see. Then it appears.
Orange and rigid. Thin snout. Bony plates. Stripes down the torso. Totally still.
And if you’ve never seen a seahorse in the wild before, you will feel honored and awed, as if you’ve just seen a unicorn beneath the sea.
Science
Leaked memo reveals California debated cutting wildfire soil testing before disaster chief’s exit
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s disaster chief quietly retired in late December amid criticism over the state’s indecisive stance on whether soil testing was necessary to protect survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires.
One year ago, Nancy Ward, then the director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), petitioned the Federal Emergency Management Agency to spearhead the cleanup of toxic ash and fire debris cloaking more than 12,000 homes across Los Angeles County.
Although Ward’s decision ensured the federal government would assume the bulk of disaster costs, it came with a major trade off. FEMA was unwilling to pay for soil sampling to confirm these homes weren’t still heavily contaminated with toxic substances after the cleanup — testing that California state agencies have typically done following similar fires in the past.
Following intense backlash from fire survivors and California lawmakers, Ward pleaded with FEMA to reconsider its soil-testing stance, writing in a Feb. 19 letter that it is “critical to protect public health” and “ensure that survivors can safely return to their homes.” Her request was denied.
However, in October, Cal OES — under Ward’s leadership — privately considered discontinuing state funding for soil testing in the aftermath of future wildfires, according to a confidential, internal draft memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
The Times requested an interview with Ward, and sent questions to her office asking about her initial decision to forgo soil testing and for clarity on the future of state’s fire recovery policy. Ward declined the request; The Times later published an article on Dec. 29 about allegations that federal contractors illegally dumped toxic ash and misused contaminated soil in breach of state policy.
Ward, who served as Cal OES director for three years, retired on Dec. 30; her deputy director, Christina Curry, stepped into the role as the interim chief. Ward also did not respond to several requests for comment for this article.
Ward was the first woman to serve as Cal OES director. She had also previously served as a FEMA regional administrator, overseeing federal disaster response in the Southwest and Pacific Islands from 2006 to 2014.
A Cal OES spokesperson said Ward’s retirement had been planned well in advance.
“Director Nancy Ward has been a steady hand and a compassionate leader through some of California’s largest disasters,” the spokesperson said. “Her decades of service have made our state stronger, safer, and more resilient. The Governor is deeply grateful for her dedication and wishes her the very best in retirement.”
The internal memo obtained by The Times was written by Ward’s assistant director, and titled: “Should the state continue to pay for soil testing as part of Private Property Debris Removal (PPDR) programs? ”
It laid out three possible answers: The state could keep funding soil testing after future wildfires; the state could defer soil testing decisions to the affected counties with the possibility of reimbursing them; or the state could stop paying for soil testing entirely.
A Cal OES spokesperson said the memo was only a draft and did not represent a policy change. “The state’s position on soil testing remains unchanged,” the spokesperson said. “California is committed to advocating for the safe, timely removal of wildfire debris. Protecting the public health and well-being of impacted communities remains the state’s foremost priority.”
The primary reason for soil testing is to prevent harmful exposures to toxic metals, such as brain-damaging lead or cancer-causing arsenic. Since 2007, comprehensive soil testing has been conducted after 64 wildfire cleanups in California, according to the memo. When soil contamination still exceeded state benchmarks after the initial cleanup, the state government redeployed cleanup workers to remove more dirt and then retest the properties.
This approach, the memo said, was critical in identifying harmful substances that “pose exposure hazards via ingestion, inhalation of dust, or through garden/food production.” Soil testing “helps ensure the safety” of children, seniors, pregnant women and people with health issues who are “more vulnerable to soilborne toxins.”
“The State has a long precedent of conducting or paying for soil testing,” the Cal OES assistant director wrote in the memo. “Pivoting from this would be a significant policy change.”
The memo cites a report from CalRecycle, the agency that has historically carried out state-led fire cleanups, that stresses the importance of the current practice to public health.
“Soil contamination after a wildfire is an invisible threat,” wrote a CalRecycle official. “If not properly cleaned and remediated in a methodical way, property owners may encounter additional hurdles during the rebuilding process and suffer additional trauma.”
“Soil sampling,” the official adds, “is the metric by which Recyclable demonstrates that debris removal operations have successfully remediated the post-disaster threat to public health and the environment.”
However, such soil testing and additional cleanup prolongs the cleanup timeline and can make it more expensive. The memo cites cost estimates from CalRecycle which show that soil testing and additional cleanup work usually costs some $4,000 to $6,000 per parcel, representing 3% to 6% of overall debris removal costs.
The state cost projections align with those made by independent environmental experts. Andrews Whelton, a Purdue University professor who researches natural disasters, estimated that soil testing and further remediation for the Eaton and Palisades fire would cost between $40 million to $70 million.
All told, the CalRecycle report states the usual soil-testing process has been a “relatively low-cost step” to safeguard public health.
Further, although soil testing may add some cost, when it’s taken as a proactive measure, it can save money down the road.
Forgoing soil testing and evidence-backed remediation can generate uncertainty about toxic contamination, which in turn could lower the value of homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, Whelton said. What’s more, the property owner may be liable for soil contamination if they fail to disclose environmental risks when selling or leasing.
The internal CalOES memo alludes to this give and take: “Funds saved initially by skipping testing may be outweighed by later unseen costs, for example, reinvesting in remediation, addressing community complaints, litigation, or cleanup failure.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has fielded over 1,100 complaints filed by property owners affected by the Eaton and Palisades fires — over 20% of which were related to the quality of work. According to internal reports obtained by The Times, federal cleanup repeatedly deviated from cleanup protocols, likely spreading contamination in the process.
Since then, FEMA officials have backed down from their hard-line stance against paying for post-fire soil testing in California in an attempt to shore up public confidence in the federal cleanup.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that FEMA will conduct a limited lead-testing program in the Eaton fire burn scar that is intended to “confirm the effectiveness of cleanup methods,” according to an EPA spokesperson. The initiative has already come under the scrutiny of environmental experts who say it lacks the rigor of California’s soil testing regimen.
It remains unclear if California will continue to implement soil-testing safeguards that made the state a national leader in fire recovery. Though state officials say these will remain unchanged, there is no legal mandate to follow these procedures.
The internal CalOES memo circulated under Ward’s leadership has only added to the cloud of uncertainty.
One thing is clear: It’s a moot point for survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fire.
As state and federal officials debated the value of soil testing, most Altadena and Pacific Palisades residents have been left to investigate the extent of environmental fallout on their own.
California officials are issuing warnings about a new flu strain that is increasing flu-related cases and hospitalizations statewide, with public health experts across the nation echoing the alerts.
A newly emerged influenza A strain, H3N2 subclade K, is already wreaking havoc globally and is affecting hospitals and clinics in California, the state’s Department of Public Health announced Tuesday. The agency described the seasonal flu activity as “elevated” in the state; data show that flu test positivity rates, which measure the percentage of patients who come in with flu symptoms and actually test positive for influenza, have been rising in recent weeks. However, they are still relatively low compared to last year’s flu season.
“Flu started to rise, in earnest, by mid-December and rates are still up,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional physician chief of infectious diseases for Kaiser Permanente. “We are hoping to see some plateauing in the next few weeks, but there’s some delay in data due to recent holidays, so it will become clearer in the next week or so.”
Hudson said most flu-related cases are being treated without the need for hospital admittance, “but those who are older or at higher risk for complications from the flu are the ones we’re mostly seeing admitted.”
According to data from the public health agency, there’s a high rate of positive flu cases in Central California and the Bay Area and a moderate rate around Sacramento and Southern California. In the northern part of the state where it’s more rural, the rate of flu cases is currently low, according to the agency’s website.
In Los Angeles County, recent data from the health department show that between the end of last year and the start of 2026, there were 162 flu-related hospitalizations and an additional 18 cases in which patients were admitted for intensive care.
Nationally, this flu season has been far worse than in California. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this flu season has led to the highest number of cases in the U.S. in more than 30 years. The agency estimates that there have been at least 15 million infections in the U.S., with 180,000 hospitalizations and 7,400 deaths, since late fall. At least two of those who died have been children, said Yvonne Maldonado, the Taube professor of global health and infectious disease at Stanford Medicine, in a news release. The state’s Department of Public Health confirmed that those pediatric flu-associated deaths occurred in California.
Last year, infectious disease experts predicted this flu season would be particularly bad for high-risk groups, specifically children, due to a decline in flu vaccination rates and a “souped-up mutant” flu strain, Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases expert at UC San Francisco, told The Times.
Last year’s flu season was particularly bad, “but little did we know what was in store for us this year,” said Dr. Neha Nanda, medical director of antimicrobial stewardship with Keck Medicine of USC. Nanda said she is seeing an early upward trend in positive influenza cases this season compared with previous years, though it isn’t quite on par with last year, or from the years preceding COVID — at least in California.
Dr. Sam Torbati, co-chair and medical director of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s emergency department, said that around the second week of December he saw a lot of patients coming into his department with flu-related illnesses, part of a surge in hospitalizations that was seen throughout the county.
He said he doesn’t recall “seeing this many patients becoming this ill.”
“It’s very early in the flu season and may get much worse,” Torbati said.
Experts believe the strain has mutated to “more likely evade” immunity from the current vaccine. That’s because the strain emerged toward the end of the summer, long after health officials had already determined the formula for the flu vaccine.
“Current seasonal flu vaccines remain effective at reducing severe illness and hospitalization, including the currently circulating viruses,” said Dr. Erica Pan, state public health officer.
Even though the flu shot might not keep you from succumbing to the illness, “it lessens your odds of having a severe case, keeps you out of the hospital and shortens the duration of the illness,” said Dr. Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention and control for UCHealth, in a report by the Assn. of American Medical Colleges.
Officials are urging the public, especially those at higher risk for severe flu complications such as the very young and older populations, to get vaccinated or take immediate antiviral treatment, such as Tamiflu.
The flu can be very serious with symptoms — fatigue, fever, cough and body aches — that feel like you got “hit by a Mack truck,” Hudson said.
For children and other high-risk individuals, the symptoms can be more severe.
“Children can develop dehydration [or] pneumonia, and more severe cases of flu in kids can lead to inflammation of the brain and heart,” Hudson said.
The problem has not been limited to the U.S. The influenza A strain, H3N2 subclade K, has caused severe flu seasons in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe and Asia.
new video loaded: Four Astronauts Splash Down on Earth After Early Return
transcript
transcript
Four Astronauts Splash Down on Earth After Early Return
Two American astronauts and others from Japan and Russia landed in the Pacific Ocean after an early journey home from the International Space Station because one of them was ill.
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You’re getting a live look inside the cabin right now. That’s Crew-11 preparing for their re-entry period. Splashdown of Crew-11. After 167 days in space, Dragon and NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui of JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov are back on Earth. The SpaceX recovery ship and team has been waiting for Dragon splashdown, and they will now begin making their way to the splashdown location. And we are seeing motion for Dragon. They are pulling it to the egress platform. And it looks like our first crew member out of the spacecraft is NASA astronaut Mike Fincke.
By Axel Boada
January 15, 2026
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