Valeria Vergara

Valeria Vergara, PhD, is particularly interested in the communicative and perceptual capacities of marine mammals and the conservation implications of such capacities. Valeria currently co-directs the Cetacean Conservation Research Program at Raincoast Foundation and serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Windsor.

Trained as a behavioral ecologist, she has participated in a diverse array of wildlife studies around the world, including baboons in Kenya, red foxes in Ontario, humpback whales in Newfoundland, Guiana dolphins in Colombia, killer whales in Argentina, B.C. and Alaska, and, during the past 19 years, beluga whales in various areas of Canada.

Her PhD research, through the University of British Columbia, was the first to document how beluga calves develop the incredibly rich vocal repertoire of this species, and the first to identify calls used for group cohesion and mother-calf contact.

More recently, Valeria provided preliminary evidence that beluga contact calls may function as “acoustic name tags.” Her latest study showed that masking of the quiet, underdeveloped calls of newborn belugas by anthropogenic noise can impair mother-calf contact.