Laguna San Ignacio on the Baja California peninsula is one of the most well known and inspirational whale watching destinations in the world. Melania Guerra of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been conducting an ongoing research project using acoustic monitoring devices to answer some of the many questions that remain about the utilization by the gray whales of this remote sanctuary and about the human impact on the aquatic mammals.

By deploying an array of passive listening devices throughout the lagoon and by attaching acoustic probes to some of the whales, Melania has been getting a clearer picture of what the whales do when they are hidden from view below the water and also how the noise from boat traffic and a nearby road affects the animals. One of the results of this groundbreaking research is the development of a technique to conduct an “acoustic census,” a way to monitor population trends by sound measurements alone.

Melania Guerra is a native of Costa Rica and she received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidad de Costa Rica. She went on to earn her M.S. in Oceanography from the University of California, San Diego, where she is also completing her Ph.D. work.

Among other things, she worked as a research assistant in the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the Universidad de Costa Rica, interned at the Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, worked on a pilot project with the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to record boat traffic across the international border and a pilot project to record underwater vocalizations of gray whales along the northbound migration at the NMFS gray whale census at Point Piedras Blancas.

As a research assistant at Scripps, her work focuses on marine mammal acoustics, digital signal processing and sound propagation and she built many of the acoustic instruments she uses in her research.

Come and meet our speaker in the relaxed surroundings of the Puesta del Sol restaurant at our no-host dinner before the meeting. Dinner is at 6 p.m., at 1622 S. Gaffey Street (at the corner of Gaffey and 17th St.) in San Pedro.

For more info call ACS/LA at 310-847-0516