We design our Earthwatch Teen Expeditions specifically and exclusively for 15- to 18-year-olds. They’re unlike any other experience a teenager can have.
Do something special this summer: visit Costa Rica’s beautiful Golfo Dulce to help protect its whales and dolphins and meet fascinating people from around the world.
Golfo Dulce, a narrow inlet on the southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica, provides a rich habitat for cetaceans (whales and dolphins). It remains fairly pristine, since the many tourists who visit Costa Rica each year haven’t quite discovered it yet—which makes now a crucial time to investigate what the ecosystem needs to remain healthy. By understanding the behavior and tracking the abundance of the whales and dolphins in Golfo Dulce, we can ensure we have the information we need to best protect them when tourism starts in earnest in this wild place.
The researchers you’ll join gather information on three species of cetacean in the gulf: the pan-tropical spotted dolphin, the bottlenose dolphin, and the humpback whale. With your help, they’ll continue to count these species’ population sizes, see how individual dolphins interact with each other, and try to understand what habitats in the gulf they prefer. This information will help us understand the health of the cetacean populations at this moment and, in turn, to develop conservation plans to protect the biodiversity in the gulf in the future.