ACS Conference

I attended the American Cetacean Society's (ACS) 12th international Conference last weekend in Monterey. This was the first time I attended this conference as just a PARTICIPANT. In 1998, I was involved with a small group of people in Pacifica who wanted to turn an abandoned wastewater treatment plant into a marine life museum/aquarium. While I still think the project was a great idea, for various reasons it never got off the ground. This project did, however get my juices flowing in the direction of active marine conservation, and it gave me the confidence to move forward with my next project. A whale and dolphin conservation organization, of which I was a member, had no chapter near San Francisco. I changed that by founding the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the American Cetacean Society.

The focus of this chapter was education and research. We presented whale education programs at schools and libraries, and we gave out student research grants. I served as the president of this chapter until my brain surgery in 2006. Every other year, our chapter held an auction to raise money for student research grants. The National ACS Conference is also held every on alternate years, so on our chapter's non-auction years, I helped organize and run the silent auction at the national conference. I have gone to every conference since the beginning of the SF chapter, except, of course, 2006: the year of my surgery.

During the 2008 conference, my kids helped plan and carry out a raffle. This year, I decided to attend just for fun. 

Some of the talks were on the ecology of whales, and some were about conservation of whales. While scientific data was presented, one scientist compared fin whales to corvettes and humpback whales to minivans. The sleeker, faster fin whales got to be the cool car!

The last presentation of the conference was a showing of a clip from The Cove, followed by a discussion with the film's director. This film, which is really about gathering evidence if the horrific killing of dolphins in a small cove in Japan, has energized conservationists worldwide. Hearing the story first-hand from the director was a fantastic way to end the conference.