![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/tidepools.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIt will help better track the effects of climate change on the ecosystem.<\/p>\n
Aug 14, 2026<\/p>\n
Updated 4:01 pm PT<\/p>\n
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Marine biologist Greg Rouse, standing, and chemist Steve Taylor collect seawater and sand from La Jolla tide pools.\u00a0(Lucas Brady Woods\/LAist)<\/p>\n
Here are the morning\u2019s top stories on Friday, August 14, 2026<\/p>\n
Dinosaur bones and taxidermied animals get most of the attention at the Natural History Museum in LA County. But researchers are excited about a new collection<\/a> that could have big implications for monitoring climate change.\u00a0\u00a0The U.S. Department of Justice says California is failing to protect incarcerated women <\/a>from sexual abuse and harassment by prison staff.\u00a0A federal judge says she\u2019s leaning toward ruling that federal immigration agents can not make warrantless arrests<\/a> under most circumstances in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n On an overcast morning in July, marine biologist Greg Rouse knelt next to a large tide pool near La Jolla\u2019s Bird Rock. \u201cThis place is incredibly diverse in habitats,\u201d Rouse said, scooping a sample of seawater into a plastic bag.<\/p>\n A few miles down the beach, in his seaside lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, Rouse separated the sampled water into a petri dish. At first glance it was just water and some floating ocean debris.<\/p>\n But when Rouse slid the petri dish under a microscope, hundreds of nearly-microscopic animals burst into life on a high-resolution monitor: shrimps and snails, pillbug-like isopods, worms of all sorts of different shapes, and at least one bright-orange sea slug. Sampling tide pools like this is fairly routine for Rouse, but lately, it has been part of something bigger. Rouse is leading the first phase of an effort to document California\u2019s intertidal ecosystems. That means logging every organism found in the tidal seawater, sand and rocks from San Diego to the Oregon border over the next two years. \u201cIt\u2019s a baseline of what is here right now,\u201d Rouse said. \u201cIt\u2019s a shame we didn\u2019t do this 20 or 40 years ago. But in those times, we didn\u2019t really have the DNA technology and the cost efficiency that we have these days.\u201d<\/p>\n The project, called the California Intertidal Biodiversity DNA Barcode Library project, is ambitious. Nothing of this scale has been attempted in the U.S. It\u2019s being led by a coalition of top research institutions, including Scripps, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the California Ocean Protection Council and the Southern California Coastal Research Project. The goal is to create a comprehensive picture of California\u2019s tidal habitats by focusing on the algae and invertebrates that live in them, including their DNA profiles. Scientists say that will let them more effectively track changes in those ecosystems.<\/p>\n The intertidal region is made up of the narrow strip of coastline that alternates between being submerged at high tide and exposed at low tide. It\u2019s habitats are some of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including\u00a0rising water temperatures<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0sea levels<\/a>. The two-year project launched with $10 million in state funding earlier this year but kicked into high gear this summer.<\/p>\n Last month, Rouse led a group of dozens of scientists to the tide pools, where they pulled more than 7,000 samples from the area around Bird Rock. \u201cAnything we could see, we took. But also we took a lot of stuff you can\u2019t see back to the lab and had many people on microscopes finding all the tiny creatures,\u201d Rouse said. \u201cBecause most of the diversity is actually too small to see.\u201d Testing is still underway, but so far the samples represent 1,600 species of invertebrates and algae, hundreds of which could be new to science.<\/p>\n California prison officials<\/a>\u00a0have failed to protect incarcerated women from sexual abuse and harassment by staff for years, the U.S. Department of Justice\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0in a new report.<\/p>\n The Justice Department\u00a0began<\/a>\u00a0investigating the Central California Women\u2019s Facility in Chowchilla and the California Institution for Women in Chino nearly two years ago after hundreds of incarcerated women\u00a0filed legal claims<\/a>\u00a0alleging sexual exploitation by staff and an officer was\u00a0arrested<\/a>\u00a0for sexually abusing at least 22 women. The department reviewed 350 allegations of sexual misconduct, interviewed prisoners and looked at body-worn camera footage.<\/p>\n