Tonight (Tuesday, May 25) the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Cetacean Society is hosting a free lecture at 7:30 at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.

Researcher Ted Cranford, San Diego State University, will be presenting his work on toothed whale biosonar using rocket science and cybernetic technology.

Here’s more details straight from the ACS/LA website: Cuvier’s beaked whales are among the species that raise the most concern when it comes to the effects of military sonar. Not much is known about these inhabitants of deep oceans who spend their lives far from shore and are seldom encountered by humans. In a quest to better understand the effect of sound on these animals, Dr. Ted Cranford used cutting edge technology and innovative methods to build a model of the whales’ hearing apparatus.

He developed a technique to scan the head of a dead Cuvier’s beaked whale in one of the world’s largest industrial x-ray CT scanners and built a Finite Element Model (FEM) to reveal how they hear. The results turned the previously held beliefs on their head and showed that the whales’ hearing anatomy treats sounds of different frequencies in different ways. The methods pioneered by Cranford hold great promise for research with many other species.

Check out Ted Cranford’s Whale Science website and for a very interesting article on his research click here.

The Cabrillo Marine Aquarium is located at 3720 Stephen M. White Drive in San Pedro. ACS/LA lectures are free and are held on the last Tuesday of January through May and September through November. For more information, please visit the ACS/LA website.

Come and meet Ted Cranford at a no-host dinner before the meeting. Dinner is at 6 p.m., at Puesta del Sol (17th and Gaffey) in San Pedro (310) 833-9765.

Hope to see you there!