Kerri Seger

Kerri graduated from The Ohio State University in 2007 with a combined degree in zoology, ecology, and music education. As a doctoral candidate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in bioacoustics, she has mixed these diverse interests by studying humpback whales and the sound environments where they live and communicate. By mapping the percent of time that each sound type exists in Laguna San Ignacio (Mexico), where gray whales mate and give birth, she and her co-authors have found that snapping shrimp and croaker fish are as loud or louder than the boat engines used by fisherman and whale-watchers. At least for now. In Cabo San Lucas, the humpback whales sing so profusely that they are the overwhelming sound source in the ocean, and Kerri's second thesis chapter has found a way to measure how many whales are in an area based on how loudly they are singing. She is also cataloguing the social sound that humpback whales make in order to one day, work on dialect studies for the many populations. To collect these social sounds, Kerri learned to attach suction cup "microphones" to whales. This skill lead to her position on the Cetos team that is now developing the affordable miniGPS tag.

December 2015