The Zooniverse team at Oxford University and Scientific American have launched the whale-song project, called Whale FM, to involve curious citizen scientists. Everyone can now help marine researchers better understand how Killer Whales and Pilot Whales communicate, stated in a press release from Oxford University.
Pilot whales (Dylan Walker)
The Whale FM website at http://whale.fm displays calls from both Killer Whales and the lesser known Pilot Whales. Citizen scientists are presented with a whale call and shown where it was recorded on a map of the world’s oceans and seas. After listening to the whale call, which is represented on screen as a spectrogram showing how the pitch of the sound changes with time, the volunteers are asked to listen to a number of potential matching calls from the project’s database. If a match is found, the citizen scientist clicks on that sound’s spectrogram and the results are stored.
‘Collecting and processing more than 16,000 unique whale calls was a new challenge for the Zooniverse team,’ said Robert Simpson of Oxford University, lead developer for Whale FM. ‘As everyone matches up pairs of sounds we are creating a web of whale ‘words’ to help marine biologists understand how whales communicate. The variety of calls you hear on Whale FM show you that they obviously talk to each other about a lot of different things!’
The dataset generated by this project will enable scientists to address a number of questions regarding whale communication. For example, biologists studying killer whales report that each group of whales has its own distinctive dialect of calls, with related groups having dialects that are more similar. The Whale FM calls on citizen scientists to test these results by making their own judgments of similarity between calls.
