Vancouver Island lies on the west coast of Canada right on the border with the United States in the heart of the Pacific temperate rain forest. It is an area of great natural beauty and amazing biodiversity. The waters surrounding it are home to a large variety of marine mammals that have played an important role in human activity in the area, from the subsistence hunts of First Nations and Native American peoples and commercial exploitation to a booming ecotourism industry. The area has also produced much pioneering and groundbreaking research like cetacean photo identification techniques that have become standard research tools worldwide.

Bernardo Alps will cover the history of marine mammal research around Vancouver Island and one of the largest concentrations of whale watching operators anywhere in the world. He will also talk about his experience at the Whale Lab run by University of Victoria graduate students on a remote island in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island conducting research on the gray whales of the Pacific coast feeding aggregation. These whales are a subset of the eastern Pacific stock and feed along the coast from northern California to southeast Alaska. 

Bernardo is a Research Associate at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro and a Seabird Field Technician for Point Blue Conservation Science (formerly Point Reyes Bird Observatory). He is a social media consultant and an accomplished wildlife photographer, and has spent part of the summer working as research assistant at the University of Victoria’s Whale Lab on Flores, British Columbia. Bernardo is volunteer naturalist with the Cabrillo Whalewatch program, a volunteer observer with ACS/LA’s Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project and an animal care volunteer at the Marine Mammal Care Center at Fort MacArthur.