The whale song project is an interactive study founded by Scientific American and Zooniverse. The site shows calls from both Orca and Pilot Whales. Orcas are not actually considered whales, they belong to the dolphin family. Whales and dolphins are both considered cetaceans and are closely related, but still differ in bodily structure.
Not only does the site show an image of the call, which you can click on and listen to, but shows where on the map this call was recorded. Sometimes a whale’s call is outside of the normal human hearing range, so the frequency of the calls on the site are slowed down in their frequency in order to allow humans to be able to hear them. However, this can make it difficult to truly hear similarities between the calls of different whales.
The site allows us to see spectrograms, which you can click on to hear. The point of the site is to be able to click on different spectrograms and be able to match calls of the same whale. If it is not possible to find a match, you have the ability to move on to different calls. You can find matches by looking at the spectrogram or by simply listening to the call, the combination of both allowing an easier method of matching.
The study that this is based on is trying to answer the question of when and why animals make specific calls. The communication of killer and pilot whales is still poorly understood, and the larger number of datasets showing their calls makes is difficult to interpret the behavior of the marine mammals. Tracking and interpreting their calls allow us to understand possibilities of what the calls mean as well as their movements.
I enjoyed participating in this Citizen Science Project because I find the behavior of marine mammals to be extremely interesting. I have spent much of my time learning about marine mammals and behavior, but have never gone in depth with my research on their various calls. Though I still feel that I have much to learn about what the whale’s calls actually mean and how I can interpret this data, matching the calls of different whales was an informative experience.
A link to the site can be found below:
http://whale.fm
