Point Arena Lighthouse Lecture Series: Shari Goforth

As part of the Lighthouse Lecture Series, Shari Goforth will present "Bioacoustics: Sound and Singers in the Sea" on Saturday, November 15, at 4 p.m. "We will spend this time looking at the importance of sound for marine cetaceans, how they create sound, the difference between song, language, communication, human-made noise, and we will listen to select sounds of whales, dolphins, and creatures of the ocean." Shari Goforth has spent her career as a Registered Veterinary Technician, mostly in small companion animal medicine. She not only loved animals growing up, but she was also interested in their biology, behaviors, and conservation. Since moving to the coast nine years ago, she has pursued her passion for understanding whales, photographing them, and submitting photos to databases for identification. She developed her Mendonoma Gray Whale Photo ID Project, taking her first photo in 2018 with basic camera gear. Over time, she invested in high-quality camera equipment and studied settings and techniques to improve photo resolution. Her whale interest-turned-obsession led her to recent travel following gray whales to Monterey Bay, the Oregon coast, and one of the gray whale breeding and birthing lagoons, Laguna San Ignacio, Baja California Sur, Mexico. She has followed bubble-net feeding humpbacks in S.E. Alaska, and has photographed grays, humpbacks, blues, finbacks, and others, including small cetaceans, off the coast of Fort Bragg, CA, adding those photos to databases.