MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Facing public pressure to get in vitro fertilization services restarted, Alabama lawmakers moved closer to approving protections for fertility clinics that shut down after a state court ruled that frozen embryos are the legal equivalent of children.

Both chambers of the Alabama Legislature advanced bills Thursday that would shield clinics from prosecution and civil lawsuits. Each bill now moves to the opposite chamber for debate. Bill sponsor Rep. Terri Collins said they are aiming to get the measure approved and to the governor on Wednesday.

“This would at least keep the clinics open and the families moving forward,” Collins said. She described the legislation as a temporary fix while lawmakers weigh if additional action is needed.

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled in mid-February that three couples who had frozen embryos destroyed in an accident at a storage facility could pursue wrongful death lawsuits for their “extrauterine children.” The ruling, treating an embryo the same as a child or gestating fetus under the wrongful death statute, raised concerns about civil liabilities for clinics. Three major providers announced a pause on IVF services.

Republicans’ proposal focused on lawsuit protections instead of attempting to address the legal status of embryos. The legislation would shield providers from prosecution and civil lawsuits related to the “damage to or death of an embryo” during IVF services.

The bills advanced with broad bipartisan support. Representatives voted 94-6 for the proposal, and state senators voted 32-0 for it.

Some Republicans said they want to consider future restriction on what happens to unused embryos.

Republican Rep. Ernie Yarbrough of Trinity tried unsuccessfully to put an amendment on the bill that would prohibit clinics from intentionally discarding embryos that are unused or after genetic testing.

Republican Rep. Mark Gidley of Hokes Bluff said he wants lawmakers to consider putting regulation on fertility clinics.

“This is what is important to me and a lot of members of this House. Understand, that once that is fertilized, it begins to grow, even though it may not be in a woman’s uterus,” Gidley said.
A Democratic lawmaker said the state, which has a stringent abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, has spent too much time interfering with the decisions of women.

“I am so tired of folks telling me as a female in Alabama what I’m going to do with my own body. It’s time that we stop this,” Democratic Rep. Barbara Drummond of Mobile said. She said a woman texted her this morning asking if the state would take “custody” and responsibility of her frozen embryos if they are now considered children.

Democrats in the Alabama Senate had unsuccessfully tried to amend the bill to state that a human embryo outside a uterus can not be considered an unborn child or human being under state law. Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison, a Democrat from Birmingham, said that was the most direct way to deal with the issue. Republicans blocked the amendment from coming up for a vote.

Rep. Chris England, a Democrat from Tuscaloosa, said lawmakers may be able to provide a temporary solution through legislation but a long-term solution must address the 2018 constitutional amendment, which he said essentially established “personhood” for embryos.

“There are far-reaching ramifications of personhood,” England said.

More than 200 IVF patients filled the Statehouse on Wednesday pressuring lawmakers to get IVF services restarted in the state. They showed lawmakers babies created through IVF treatment or described how the ruling halted their path to parenthood.

LeeLee Ray underwent eight miscarriages, one ectopic pregnancy and multiple surgeries before turning to surrogacy in hopes of having a child. She and her husband found a surrogate through a matching program, but now can’t have their embryos transferred to her and are unable to move their embryos out of state.

“I’m just frustrated. We had a light at the end of the tunnel,” Ray said Wednesday.

Joby Aviation, with its recently established headquarters in the Harvey West area of Santa Cruz and offices and facilities also in Marina and San Carlos, is currently developing electric air taxis for commercial passenger service, which it hopes to launch in 2025, and recently moved closer to that goal after completing another phase in the process to becoming certified by the Federal Aviation Administration.

“It’s going to have ridesharing networks, which is one of the things we are excited about in Santa Cruz, particularly with Highway 17,” said Santa Cruz Economic Development and Housing Director Bonnie Lipscomb at the meeting. “Joby also fits in with our community values of providing sustainable solutions to today’s challenges of congestion and climate change.”

According to the agenda report associated with the motion to approve the $500,000 loan to Joby, the funding would be provided to Joby on a reimbursement basis based on an annual survey of its job generation and employee retention. The agreement is meant to incentivize the hiring of 250 new, full-time employees in the city in total, which includes positions for technicians, engineers, machinists and managers, among others.

“That’s really the crux of what this agreement is about, is the creation of local jobs in our community,” said Lipscomb. “This incentivizes up to 250 jobs.”

The report points out that the loan is taken from the economic development trust fund and does not impact the city’s general fund, and that the loan funds “will be used for testing, manufacturing and safety equipment, including communications, safety, and other advanced specialized manufacturing equipment for the facility, such as CNC machines, lasers, and grinders.”

According to the report, the terms of the employment incentive loan include that it will be disbursed over no more than five years and with installment payments based on the annual employment survey. For each full-time employee that Joby hires, the city would loan the company $2,000. However, Joby cannot claim more than 100 new employees in a year, which means that the maximum loan amount awarded for a year is capped at $200,000.

During the public comment period, Joby Aviation’s Head of State and Local Policy George Kivork called into the meeting to speak to the process of the loan agreement and the company’s commitment to the city.

“We have spent the last year making sure that the agreement and the private partnership that we enter here together would be for the public interest,” said Kivork. “We put a very long range timeline of us not going anywhere for the next 10 years to commit ourselves to Santa Cruz.”

The City Council approved the motion in a vote of 6-1 with Councilmember Sandy Brown voting no.

To read the loan agreement, visit cityofsantacruz.com.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A moon lander that ended up on its side managed to beam back more pictures, with only hours remaining before it dies.

Intuitive Machines posted new photos of the moon’s unexplored south polar region Tuesday.

The company’s lander, Odysseus, captured the shots last Thursday shortly before making the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years. Odysseus landed on its side, hampering communication and power generation.

Once sunlight can no longer reach the lander’s solar panels, operations will end. Intuitive Machines expects that to happen sometime between Tuesday afternoon and early Wednesday. The mission, part of NASA’s effort to boost the lunar economy, was supposed to last until at least Thursday, when lunar nighttime sets in. NASA has six experiments on board.

Intuitive Machines is the first private business to land a spacecraft on the moon without crashing. Another U.S. company launched its own lunar lander last month, but a fuel leak doomed the mission and the craft came crashing back to Earth.

Then there are elephant seals.

Once on the brink of extinction, elephant seals are expanding north into new breeding grounds along the California coast, turning long-empty beaches into a ruckus of roars, grunts, chirps and moans.

“It’s a conservation success story,” said zoology Professor Dawn Goley of Cal Poly Humboldt. “They were in dire trouble.”

On Thursday, Goley’s team hiked 10 miles and crossed a raging river to count and tag pups at the state’s newest and northernmost colony on Humboldt County’s Lost Coast, near Punta Gorda. They tallied 265 pups, up from only nine seven years ago.

Scientists attach tiny colored tags on flippers to identify a seal’s birthplace: yellow for Santa Barbara’s Channel Islands, white for San Luis Obispo’s San Simeon, green for San Mateo’s Año Nuevo State Park, pink for Marin’s Point Reyes National Seashore — and blue for members of Humboldt’s young colony, in the King Range National Conservation Area.

The tags make it possible to trace the origins of a group as they pick a breeding ground. For instance, it’s known that newborns on the Humboldt beach descend from animals who ventured north from Point Reyes, but also Año Nuevo and San Simeon.

“As they expand at sites, they fill up the space,” said marine ecologist Sarah Allen, former science adviser at Point Reyes. “Then females and juveniles start looking for some other place to get established.”

While this year’s storms have claimed some young lives, an estimated 200,000 animals are breeding and giving birth this season in the five National Marine Sanctuaries along the Pacific coast, covering nearly 15,000 square miles.

They’re all related, descendents of a tiny colony in Mexico — which once numbered fewer than 100 animals — that escaped the violence of 19th century hunters.

Massive and magnificent, elephant seals are famed for their extraordinary physiological abilities, which allow them to endure environmental extremes. They spend most of their lives at sea, migrating twice a year as far north as Alaska before returning to California beaches to molt and reproduce.

Their distant ancestors were wanderers, venturing from warm Caribbean waters through an ancient sea that once separated North and South America.

Hunted for oil-rich blubber in the 1800s, “few or none can be found north of San Diego” by 1868, natural historian Titus Cronise wrote. The species was presumed extinct by the late 1870s.

Remarkably, a small cluster of animals survived in Baja California.

With legal protection from further hunting, six pups were reported in 1911. As the colony grew in the 1920s, animals began to depart for nearby islands.

Experts now estimate more than 40,000 births annually.

Populations of California’s other pinniped species, such as harbor seals and sea lions, also have rebounded to healthy levels since passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, said Allen. But elephant seals are the most successful because they are not dependent on the California Current, which is influenced by El Niño conditions, for their food. Instead, they dive deep off the continental shelf into a different ecosystem.

But there are long-term concerns. The species suffered a genetic “bottleneck” at their remnant Mexican colony, due to inbreeding, with worrisome consequences, according to a study published this week by scientists at England’s Durham University and UC Santa Cruz. The team’s analysis of 270 modern animals discovered reduced genetic diversity in key genes that are linked to reproductive success and the seals’ ability to dive and forage efficiently.

“So far, the species has recovered remarkably well, but these findings call into question how susceptible it might be to environmental stresses in the future,” Durham University molecular ecologist Rus Hoelzel wrote in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Currently, there are at least 25 breeding colonies along the Pacific coast. The largest is in Southern California’s Channel Islands. The fastest growing colony is at San Simeon near the Piedras Blancas lighthouse, where numbers exploded from only two dozen in 1990 to 17,000 today.

At Año Nuevo off the San Mateo coast, populations have peaked, and stabilized. But numbers at Point Reyes continue a general upward trend. In 1981, the park had one birth. Last year, there were 1,335.

Most animals stay tied to the beach of their birth, according to ecologist and evolutionary biologist Roxanne Beltran at UC Santa Cruz.

But overcrowded colonies can spell trouble for newborns, UCSC research found. With higher population density, there is more adult conflict — fighting females, tumultuous males. Pups, who get lost or waste energy trying to find their mother, tend to be smaller in size.

At Point Reyes, big storms seem to help drive the creation of new colonies, Allen said. The storms of 1982, 1996 and 1998 caused dramatic shifts in the locations of populations at Point Reyes, because pregnant females were washed off beaches.

“You can’t retain the social structure of the colony if you’re getting washed out all the time,” she said.

Beltran’s research has found that some Año Nuevo youngsters, dubbed “prospectors,” explore new sites during their annual migration. Monitoring 50 animals, she found that about three or four youngsters returned to a different colony.

“They came up north, and then more north, and more north,” she said. In 2009, a pup was born at Canada’s Great Race Rock Island, an ecological reserve southwest of Victoria. Since then, another three to five are born on the island every year..

“But how they find those other colonies — when they’ve never been there in their whole life — is a mystery,” she said.

The site is attractive for many reasons, said Goley. It features a wide beach and elevated “terraces.” Rocks help protect animals from sharks, storm surges and high tides. There’s a nearby deep sea canyon, for easy feeding. The only human access is along the Lost Coast Trail, a 24-mile beach trek that generally takes three days, requires a permit and is impassable during storms and high tides.

Initially, most of the mothers were newcomers, arriving from southern beaches.

But now Humboldt natives have matured and are returning to the beach to give birth, completing the cycle.

Protection and conservation “over generations, offers them a way to be successful,” said Goley. “It’s a real honor to be a part of that journey.”

There’s a dirty secret about the fast-growth Inland Empire economy – low pay.

Riverside: $1,081 weekly wage (last of the 50) – off 0.6% in a year (No. 27 wage change) for 818,100 jobs – staffing that’s up 1.7% (No. 18 job growth).

San Bernardino: $1,117 wage (No. 49) – off 0.4% (No. 22) for 835,200 jobs – off 1% (fourth-worst performance).

The Inland Empire has become a major hub for the rapidly expanding logistics industry, which moves goods from Southern California ports and factories across the region and the nation. Unfortunately, this warehouse work is rarely high-paying employment.

In addition, the Inland Empire also serves as a low-cost alternative to nearby coastal communities for bosses seeking staffing. Ponder the pay in three counties closer to the Pacific …

Los Angeles: $1,481 weekly wage (No. 20 of the 50) – up 0.5% in a year (No. 16 wage change) for 4.46 million jobs – staffing that’s off 0.9% (No. 46).

San Diego: $1,464 wage (No. 21) – off 1.7% (No. 42) for 1.53 million jobs – up 0.7% (No. 34).

Orange: $1,441 wage (No. 23) – off 1.1% (No. 36) for 1.65 million jobs – up 0.4% (No. 39).

Still, it’s noteworthy that the average wages in these coastal communities are mid-range pay among big US job markets when the cost of living is so high in Southern California. It’s no wonder so many households have at least two paychecks coming in.

Yet, the nation’s highest wages remain in the Bay Area, though that region has struggled with job cuts …

Santa Clara: $3,105 weekly wage (highest of the 50) – up 4.3% in a year (largest wage change) for 1.12 million jobs – staffing that’s off 0.4% (No. 45).

San Francisco: $2,969 wage (No. 2) – up 2.9% (No. 2) for 723,500 jobs – off 2.6% (No. 48).

Alameda: $1,797 wage (No. 9) – off 0.8% (No. 30) for 796,600 jobs – up 0.2% (No. 42).

Sacramento: $1,449 wage (No. 22) – up 0.8% (No. 10) for 713,700 jobs – up 1.5% (No. 22).

Bottom line

Let’s drill down on these nine big California job markets – with 12.7 million workers – compared with 41 elsewhere in the US in this top 50 analysis that had a combined 39.7 million employees.

Wages in California run $1,671 a week vs. $1,554 elsewhere – only an 8% difference. Though Golden State workers got an average 0.6% raise in a year vs. an 0.5% wage cut elsewhere.

But California employment fell by 0.2% in 12 months vs. a 1.3% gain elsewhere.

Jonathan Lansner is the business columnist for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at jlansner@scng.com

NEW YORK  — Leap year. It’s a delight for the calendar and math nerds among us. So how did it all begin and why?

Have a look at some of the numbers, history and lore behind the (not quite) every four year phenom that adds a 29th day to February.

BY THE NUMBERS

The math is mind-boggling in a layperson sort of way and down to fractions of days and minutes. There’s even a leap second occasionally, but there’s no hullabaloo when that happens.

The thing to know is that leap year exists, in large part, to keep the months in sync with annual events, including equinoxes and solstices, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

It’s a correction to counter the fact that Earth’s orbit isn’t precisely 365 days a year. The trip takes about six hours longer than that, NASA says.

Contrary to what some might believe, however, not every four years is a leaper. Adding a leap day every four years would make the calendar longer by more than 44 minutes, according to the National Air & Space Museum.

Later, on a calendar yet to come (we’ll get to it), it was decreed that years divisible by 100 not follow the four-year leap day rule unless they are also divisible by 400, the JPL notes. In the past 500 years, there was no leap day in 1700, 1800 and 1900, but 2000 had one. In the next 500 years, if the practice is followed, there will be no leap day in 2100, 2200, 2300 and 2500.

Still with us?

The next leap years are 2028, 2032 and 2036.

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WITHOUT A LEAP DAY?

Eventually, nothing good in terms of when major events fall, when farmers plant and how seasons align with the sun and the moon.

“Without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November,” said Younas Khan, a physics instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow. There will be no feeling of Christmas.”

WHO CAME UP WITH LEAP YEAR?

The short answer: It evolved.

Ancient civilizations used the cosmos to plan their lives, and there are calendars dating back to the Bronze Age. They were based on either the phases of the moon or the sun, as various calendars are today. Usually they were “lunisolar,” using both.

Now hop on over to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. He was dealing with major seasonal drift on calendars used in his neck of the woods. They dealt badly with drift by adding months. He was also navigating a vast array of calendars starting in a vast array of ways in the vast Roman Empire.

He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BCE. It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added. Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time.

But still, under Julius, there was drift. There were too many leap years! The solar year isn’t precisely 365.25 days! It’s 365.242 days, said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Thomas Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said adding periods of time to a year to reflect variations in the lunar and solar cycles was done by the ancients. The Athenian calendar, he said, was used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months.

That didn’t work for seasonal religious rites. The drift problem led to “intercalating” an extra month periodically to realign with lunar and solar cycles, Palaima said.

The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping still gradually accumulated, according to NASA. But stability increased, Palaima said.

The Julian calendar was the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years. Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who calibrated further. His Gregorian calendar took effect in the late 16th century. It remains in use today and, clearly, isn’t perfect or there would be no need for leap year. But it was a big improvement, reducing drift to mere seconds.

Why did he step in? Well, Easter. It was coming later in the year over time, and he fretted that events related to Easter like the Pentecost might bump up against pagan festivals. The pope wanted Easter to remain in the spring.

He eliminated some extra days accumulated on the Julian calendar and tweaked the rules on leap day. It’s Pope Gregory and his advisers who came up with the really gnarly math on when there should or shouldn’t be a leap year.

“If the solar year was a perfect 365.25 then we wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky math involved,” Eakes said.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH LEAP YEAR AND MARRIAGE?

Bizarrely, leap day comes with lore about women popping the marriage question to men. It was mostly benign fun, but it came with a bite that reinforced gender roles.

There’s distant European folklore. One story places the idea of women proposing in fifth century Ireland, with St. Bridget appealing to St. Patrick to offer women the chance to ask men to marry them, according to historian Katherine Parkin in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Family History.

Nobody really knows where it all began.

In 1904, syndicated columnist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, aka Dorothy Dix, summed up the tradition this way: “Of course people will say … that a woman’s leap year prerogative, like most of her liberties, is merely a glittering mockery.”

The pre-Sadie Hawkins tradition, however serious or tongue-in-cheek, could have empowered women but merely perpetuated stereotypes. The proposals were to happen via postcard, but many such cards turned the tables and poked fun at women instead.

Advertising perpetuated the leap year marriage game. A 1916 ad by the American Industrial Bank and Trust Co. read thusly: “This being Leap Year day, we suggest to every girl that she propose to her father to open a savings account in her name in our own bank.”

There was no breath of independence for women due to leap day.

SHOULD WE PITY THE LEAPLINGS?

Technology has made it far easier for leap babies to jot down their Feb. 29 milestones, though there can be glitches in terms of health systems, insurance policies and with other businesses and organization that don’t have that date built in.

There are about 5 million people worldwide who share the leap birthday out of about 8 billion people on the planet. Shelley Dean, 23, in Seattle, Washington, chooses a rosy attitude about being a leapling. Growing up, she had normal birthday parties each year, but an extra special one when leap years rolled around. Since, as an adult, she marks that non-leap period between Feb. 28 and March 1 with a low-key “whew.”

This year is different.

“It will be the first birthday that I’m going to celebrate with my family in eight years, which is super exciting, because the last leap day I was on the other side of the country in New York for college,” she said. “It’s a very big year.”

Family physician and public health specialist Dr. George Rust has warned some of his colleagues about a potential measles outbreak in Florida “for at least the past year,” he said, because of the rise in vaccine hesitancy in pockets of the community.

Now, his fears have come true.

The Florida Department of Health in Broward County is investigating six cases of measles as part of an outbreak at an elementary school in Weston. Two additional cases in children younger than 10 were reported by the Florida Department of Health, raising the county total to eight. Broward County Public Schools said the total within the district remains at six.

Statewide, “most kids in our public schools have had the vaccine, although there’s been some slippage in that in recent years. The kids who are not vaccinated, if they’re exposed to measles, 90% of them will get measles. So it’s a highly infectious disease, very contagious,” said Rust, a professor in the Florida State University College of Medicine and director of the university’s Center for Medicine and Public Health, who provides medical expertise to local public health departments.

On Tuesday, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo wrote in a letter to parents and guardians about the outbreak that it is “normally recommended” for people who have been exposed to measles and who are not vaccinated against the virus or who do not have a history of infection to stay home for up to 21 days, the length of the incubation period for measles. However, his letter leaves that up to choice.

The state health department is “deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance,” Ladapo wrote.

The letter contradicts guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which states that “unvaccinated children, including those who have a medical or other exemption to vaccination, must be excluded from school through 21 days after their most recent exposure.”

So, “there’s the possibility that children who are not immunized and who are susceptible to measles are attending school, potentially getting measles and then transmitting it to other kids,” Rust said. “Now, you’ve, on the one hand, allowed parents to make their own choices for the child who was not immunized, but you’ve also taken away some choices for those parents who may feel that their children should be protected.”

He added that “most public health experts” would agree that excluding unvaccinated children from the classroom during a measles outbreak protects that child from infection while reducing the risk of the virus spreading.

Measles is a highly contagious disease that can lead to complications and turn deadly, according to the CDC. Symptoms may include fever, cough, runny nose, watery eyes and a rash of red spots. In rare cases, it may lead to pneumonia, encephalitis or death. Measles also can weaken the immune system and may “delete” its immune memory.

“The CDC recommendations are telling us the right thing to do,” Rust said. “For the parents, keep your kid at home if they’re not immunized, and maybe go get them immunized.”

Experts recommend that children get the measles, mumps and rubella or MMR vaccine in two doses: the first between 12 months and 15 months of age, and a second between 4 and 6 years old. One dose is about 93% effective at preventing measles if you come into contact with the virus. Two doses are about 97% effective.

Nationwide, about 92% of US children have gotten the MMR vaccine by age 2, according to a 2023 report from the CDC – below the federal target of 95%.

“Local transmission of measles had been largely eliminated in the US, but we see sporadic outbreaks, especially when immunization levels drop even a little bit,” Rust said.

“If a susceptible person travels overseas and comes in contact with measles, they can bring it back into our communities and transmit it to others while they are still asymptomatic,” he said. “Measles is highly contagious – 90% of unvaccinated people who are exposed are likely to catch it – but vaccinated people are 97% protected.”

The measles virus can spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes, lingering in the air for up to two hours after they leave a room.

“We have had scattered cases throughout the years in those who are unvaccinated. Recently, we know from the Louisiana Department of Health that two individuals, both of whom were unvaccinated and had traveled out of state, have been diagnosed with measles in the Greater New Orleans Area,” Dr. Katherine Baumgarten, the system medical director for infection control and prevention at Ochsner Health in New Orleans, wrote in an email Friday.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen a decrease in the overall vaccination rate for measles as well as other diseases. This is very concerning and can most likely be attributed to children falling behind on the scheduled childhood vaccines through the recent pandemic and overall vaccine hesitancy in recent years,” she said. “With the decrease in vaccination rate, the highly contagious measles virus has reappeared and could spread through the general public among those unvaccinated.”

CNN’s Carlos Suarez contributed to this report.

In 2016,“we had times when there were so many whales in front of us that it was difficult to count them all,” said Aimée R. Lang, research biologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

Not so much anymore.

Whale experts are anxiously awaiting the 2024 count, which could hold more bad news about migratory gray whales, whose population has been declining.

Last year’s gray whale count showed a sharp decline, a negative trend consistent with the past few years. The count could be low for plenty of reasons and none in isolation. It might be that the whales are migrating farther offshore, out of sight of the cliff-side counters. It’s possible the whales are delaying their migration to gain a little more winter weight. Or maybe, the population peaked too high, and the numbers are dropping to a level the waters along the Pacific coast can sustain.

Gray whales were the original “whale-watching whales.” The first-ever water-based whale watch in the United States took place in 1955 at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego, when whale-spotting hopefuls paid $1 to catch some gray whale tail flips. In the 1960s and ‘70s, California fishermen often forfeited the off-season catch to profit from whale-watching tours during the winter, when the charismatic creatures make their 6,000-mile journey from their Arctic feeding grounds to give birth in the calm, protective lagoons of Mexico.

After they were nearly hunted to extinction by commercial whalers, gray whales were federally protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. From then on, the eastern gray whale population experienced turbulent but steady population growth and peaked in 2016 at 27,000. In 2023, the whale counters estimated the population at 14,500 — around the same abundance as when they were recovering from commercial whaling.

One fish, two fish

How do we know how many whales pass the bay? Binoculars and patience.

“It’s actually pretty simple. We have a team of two observers scanning the study area by eye and with binoculars, counting the whales as they go past,” said Lang, the research biologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

The team starts their survey at the end of December and watches until mid-February. At the end of the field season, they surmise how many whales likely swam past at night based on the day counts. During the northbound migration in the spring, counters specifically look for mother-calf pairs.

After the high 2016 count, NOAA did another survey in 2019. That year, the whale counters identified fewer animals. By the end of 2019, over 200 whales had stranded along the Pacific coast, which triggered the declaration of an Unusual Mortality Event (UME).

The population was down, and the remaining individuals were struggling.

“I’ll never forget in the 2019-2020 season, they were coming down from their feeding grounds, and they were very thin on the southbound migration,” said Colleen Talty, marine biologist at Monterey Bay Whale Watch. “Usually, we see thin whales on the Northbound migration because they’ve already fasted for four months. So that was super concerning.”

Instead of fat and happy whales bypassing San Francisco Bay to keep on toward Mexico, they were pitstopping in the Bay to feed on krill. “Basically, they were starving, so they were getting hit by boats more often because the shipping community wasn’t used to the gray whales going inside the Bay,” said Talty.

A January report by volunteers off the Palos Verdes Peninsula Coast indicated a 40-year low for the southbound population. Until the NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center’s official population count this winter, we won’t have a full picture of the current population. But there are a few potential reasons for this overall population decline.

Gray whales spend the summer eating in Alaska. They feed on amphipods, tiny crustaceans that eat algae off the underside of northern sea ice. As temperatures warm due to human-caused climate change, sea ice melts. Without a place for their food to grow, amphipods starve, so whales suffer, too.

Gray whales are known to fast during their migration, so ideally, they begin their journey with lots of winter weight. With a dwindling food supply, they might be starting their migration later to gain more winter weight.

“Over the last four or five years now, we’ve noticed it’s about three to four weeks delayed. They seem to be spending more time up in the feeding grounds before heading down to the breeding grounds in general,” said Talty.

It could also be that the gray whale population has reached carrying capacity—the number of individuals an environment can support. It’s possible that their 2016 abundance tipped the balance, and the Pacific coast simply can’t feed that many whales. But while carrying capacity is considered a natural limit, climate change is impacting it in an unnatural way, according to an October 2023 study published in Science.

But it’s not all bad news. Last year, there were fewer strandings in California and Mexico than in any year since 2019. Also, the 2023 calf count in the lagoons in Mexico was the highest in five years, which suggests a growing population.

It’s too soon to make a call about the status of the population, but so far in the 2024 migration season, NOAA’s raw whale counts are similar to, but slightly higher than they were last year at this time.

“We don’t know how that is going to translate to our abundance counts,” Lang said, “without doing all the math.”

Born with a severe peanut allergy, “I had to watch every little thing I was eating — at friends’ houses for dinner, at parties, on Halloween when I was trick-or-treating” to prevent a medical emergency, she said.

But the first-ever medication to treat food allergies, recently approved by the FDA after a successful study of volunteers like Anabelle, offers the hope of a safer future.

Regular use of the medication, called omalizumab (Xolair), reduces the risk that an accidental exposure to small amounts of an allergy-inducing food will trigger a life-threatening reaction, according to the research published in Sunday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

About 67% of people who received the injection could tolerate the equivalent of two or three peanuts without moderate to severe allergic reactions, reported the study’s senior author Dr. Sharon Chinthrajah, associate professor of medicine and pediatrics, and the acting director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford Medicine. That compares to only 7% of people who had been given a placebo powder.

It works to combat symptoms caused not just by peanuts, but other common allergens such as milk, eggs, wheat, cashews, hazelnuts and walnuts.

“There is a layer of protection for our food allergy patients so that they can live their lives with a little more normalcy,” said Chinthrajah. “This is something that our food allergy community has been waiting a long time for.”

The drug doesn’t cure the allergy. Patients must still avoid the food, and keep epinephrine nearby to treat a sudden allergic reaction.

But a simple misstep — unwittingly taking a bite of a contaminated food, for instance — is no longer catastrophic. Symptoms are less serious and have a slower onset. There’s time for treatment.

“I still had a reaction,” said Anabelle, a spunky Burlingame middle-schooler who loves science. “But it didn’t come as quickly. I could withstand more.”

There’s another benefit: easing the anxiety and stress that many families experience as they struggle to cope with a child’s allergy.

“You always have to be very conscientious and wary at any kind of social engagement where there’s food,” said Anabelle’s mother, Victoria Terry. “You’re constantly asking the host: ‘Who’s making the food? Will there be nuts? What’s in the cake?’”

Almost 8% of children and 10% of adults in the United States have a food allergy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Food allergies happen when the immune system — the body’s defense against infection — mistakenly treats proteins found in food as a threat, said Chinthrajah.

It responds by releasing allergic antibodies, which activate chemicals. It’s these chemicals that cause the symptoms of an allergic reaction, such as anaphylaxis. This acute physiological response — that includes lowered blood pressure, shock and constriction of the airways — can be deadly.

The new medication works by binding to the antibodies, taking them out of circulation, said Chinthrajah. “It’s interrupting the inflammatory cascade,” she said.

Until now, the most reliable strategy is to avoid any risky foods.

The only other approach to reduce the risk of food allergies, called oral immunotherapy, involves desensitization. Patients eat small amounts of allergy-triggering foods under medical care to build tolerance. But it can take months, even years, to work. And the treatment can trigger an allergic response.

“There is a real need for treatment that goes beyond vigilance and offers choices for our food-allergic patients,” Chinthrajah said.

Omalizumab, which the Food and Drug Administration originally approved to treat diseases such as allergic asthma and chronic hives, is produced by drugmakers Novartis and Roche and is distributed by a Roche subsidiary, Genentech. The list price ranges from about $2,900 a month for children to $5,000 a month for adults, according to Genentech, but is generally covered by insurance.

Without volunteers like Anabelle, the medicine would not have moved forward.

The FDA decision to approve the drug was based on the study of 177 participants, all children. Of these, about 20 lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and were treated at Stanford. The rest were treated at other trial sites in Baltimore, Washington D.C., New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta and beyond.

Two-thirds of the children were randomly assigned to receive omalizumab injections, and one-third received an injected placebo.

The trial, which started in 2019 and is ongoing, is a major commitment for families, which need to schedule it around school, work and family, said Chinthrajah.

Injections were given once every two or four weeks, depending on the dose needed, for four months. Then the research volunteers were “challenged” by small amounts of powders made from the allergenic food, mixed in with applesauce or pudding, to see how much of each allergy-triggering food they could safely tolerate.

Omalizumab was safe and did not cause side effects, other than some instances of minor reactions at the site of injection, said Chinthrajah.

Although the drug is now approved and can be ordered by family physicians, Stanford is continuing its study of the drug to answer many unresolved questions. For instance, they hope to learn how long the protection lasts, which people have the strongest response, and whether people with other allergies could also be protected.

“The injection hurts, but it is way more helpful than painful, knowing that there could be a positive outcome,” said Anabelle.

“It’s really awesome to have been a part of this amazing study that helped me, but not only me,” she said. “There are millions of other people across the world who have food allergies, too.”

But along the shores of Clear Lake, just north of Napa Valley’s famed wineries, is another gold-rush legacy: toxic pollution.

From the 1860s until it closed in 1957, the Sulphur Bank Mine was one of the largest mercury mines in the United States. Gold miners in the Sierra Nevada used the mercury dug from its deep tunnels and craggy cavities to separate gold from the ore that held it.

Today, what’s left is a rocky, open pit as large as 20 football fields, filled with murky blue-green acidic water 90 feet deep and surrounded by a barbed wire fence adorned with “Danger EPA Superfund Site” signs. Massive piles of mining waste around the rest of the 160-acre landscape enough to fill 250,000 dump trucks are contaminated with arsenic, mercury and other toxics.

Now a major effort has begun to clean up the historic mess and reduce health threats to people who have called the area home for thousands of years.

In November, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved a $94 million project to clean the mine site. The plan, funded in part by the bipartisan infrastructure law that President Biden signed in 2021, is the largest cleanup funded by the government at any of the 97 Superfund sites in California, a list that includes many of the most polluted properties in the state.

Scientists say the abandoned mine’s pollution is leaching into Clear Lake, only 500 feet away. The pollution is contaminating bass and other fish in one of the oldest and largest freshwater lakes in California, and endangering the health of those who eat them.

Compounding the threat, directly adjacent to the site is the Elem Indian Colony, a Native American community that has been exposed to the toxins for generations.

“This is one of the most serious mercury sites, if not the most serious mercury site, in California,” said Carter Jessop, the EPA’s project manager for the cleanup. “It has contaminated a lake that is of profound tribal significance and regional significance. It has dramatically diminished the lake.”

Work is scheduled to begin next year.

Crews will move waste rock from nine huge piles into as few as three. They will seal it with a plastic barrier, and cover it with soil at least two feet deep. They’ll plant grasses, shrubs and other plants, and will remove and replace roughly half of a large waste rock dam located between the pit and the lake, tear down old mining buildings, and channel stormwater away from the pit.

The project, when finished around 2029, should reduce the amount of mercury going into the lake by 95%, EPA officials estimate.

Leaders of the Elem Indian Colony, a Pomo tribe, are thankful for the work, but they say it has taken too long. And they’d like it to be even more extensive.

“I’m 41 years old,” said Agustin Garcia, chairman of the Elem Tribal Council, based in Santa Rosa. “When the EPA first came in to do sampling here, I was 8 or 9. Our people are still fighting the fight. We are hoping the remediation will be done in our lifetime. But I inherited it from my parents, and they inherited it from their parents, and they inherited it from their parents. It’s grim.”

The rural area, roughly 30 miles north of the tony shops and vineyards of Calistoga, is a world away from the Bay Area.

Lake County’s median household income of $53,399 is far below the state average of $84,097, and less than half of most Bay Area counties. Many of the jobs in Lake County are low-wage, causing young people to leave.

“It’s unfortunate this cleanup has taken so long,” Garcia said. “We weren’t on the top of the priority list. It seems like we never are.”

EPA officials say that since they first placed the site on the Superfund list in 1990, they have completed eight other cleanup operations at the mine, gradually improving the site as federal funding became available.

“We’ve made incremental progress,” said Mike Montgomery, the EPA’s regional Superfund director. “But this is a big step forward.”

In many ways, Sulphur Bank Mine, named for the bubbling pools of sulfur that existed there when Abraham Lincoln was president, is a large, and costly tip of a very big problem in California and the American West.

There are roughly 47,000 abandoned mines in California dating back to the 1850s, according to the state Department of Conservation. More than 5,000 still pose environmental risks. In many cases, the original owners are long dead. Bradley Mining Company, which operated Sulphur Bank from the 1920s until it closed in the 1950s, went bankrupt.

Left holding the bag? Taxpayers.

Old mercury mines, including the former New Almaden quicksilver mine south of San Jose — for which the San Jose Mercury News was named in 1860 — and the New Idria Mine, a Superfund site in rural San Benito County, have been among the most difficult to clean up.

“When people came out West in the 1800s, it was an infinite landscape of resources and opportunity,” said Mount, the former UC Davis geologist, now a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco.

“The goal was to grab as much as you could. Sulphur Bank Mine is just one example of that,” he said. “Basically the cleanup now is a taxpayer subsidy for historic mining efforts. So much damage was done. They left these truly intractable problems. It’s almost like you want to hang somebody for it. But you’d have to go dig them up.”

Previous generations clear cut forests. But forests grow back eventually. They overgrazed landscapes, but those recover when the cattle move on. They dammed rivers. Yet even dams can be taken down when they outlive their usefulness.

But the damage from mines can last hundreds, potentially thousands of years, Mount said.

Permits for new mines are very difficult to obtain because of local opposition and strict environmental regulations. Cleanup plans are required when operations are finished.

But mines that closed generations ago operated when few if any rules were in effect.

“They can spend millions to clean up the Sulphur Bank Mine,” Mount said. “But the legacy of the mine is all the mercury in the sediments of Clear Lake. They will shut off the new sources, but there is already a load of mercury in the lake.”

To remove that could involve a huge dredging operation, or capping it with clean sediment, or piping oxygen into the water to reduce the chances of the mercury being absorbed by fish and wildlife. Any such project is years away.

So the risk continues.

When mercury flows into bodies of water, bacteria can convert it into a form called methylmercury that is easily absorbed by small plants and animals, and accumulates in larger, older fish. When people eat the fish, it can harm the brain and nervous system, especially in unborn babies and children.

After scientists discovered fish with large amounts of mercury, state health officials issued an advisory against eating bass, carp and other fish in the lake in 1987. Clear Lake was among the first major bodies of water in California to have such a warning, which urges children under 17 and women of child-bearing age to eat no more than one fish of most species a week from Clear Lake, and no bass.

But generations of Elem tribe members, whose people date back in the area an estimated 12,000 years, ate lots of fish.

“I was born in 1982 and I remember eating fish from there until I was 12 or 13 years old,” Garcia said. “My uncles and I would put traps around the lake and we would have big fish fries all the time. I don’t think the residents really became aware of the problem until the late 2000s. Everybody was fishing in the area.”

The tribe has 120 members today. Decades ago, many lived on 49 acres of tribal land next to the mine. In the 1970s the Bureau of Indian Affairs paved roads and filled areas there with waste rock from the mine, unknowingly exposing the residents to even more arsenic and other hazards. Most of the waste rock in the residential area has since been removed by the EPA and its contractors. But many of the people in the community moved away. Today only about 10 homes remain.

“We were here before the mine site. We were here during the mining. And we’ll be here after,” said Piyaco Brown, one of the remaining residents.

Elem tribal members all have stories of serious health problems, from developmental disabilities to cancer.

“None of our parents are still alive. They all died of cancer in their 50s and 60s,” Brown said during a recent visit to the site.

Proving a direct cause-and-effect relationship is difficult in many polluted areas. Cancer can be caused by lifestyle choices, including diet and smoking. Some people have higher family history risk than others.

A more recent EPA study in 2020 found that for every 10,000 people who lived along the lake near the mine, there would be an additional seven cases of cancer due to the toxins at the mine, mainly from arsenic in the soil. While still relatively low, that’s seven times higher than the risk EPA considers serious enough to trigger cleanups of environmental contaminants.

The study also computed a “hazard index” for people living in the area. The score, which estimates total risk of exposure to toxic substances, was 39 for adults and 107 for children. A normal score is 1.

“We were the last generation of kids who played out here,” said Clifford Brown, a tribal member. “There were still open mine shafts. I never swam in there,” he said on a recent visit to the site, pointing to the huge pit, which smelled of rotten eggs. “But I had friends who did.”

“In a perfect world, it never would have happened,” Brown said. “But it did. We want to keep making progress. We want the cleanup done. We are tired of it. We want it fixed for our children and our grandchildren so that we can say we left them something better than we had.”