Toronto, ONT - An international group of scientists is hoping to one day solve the mystery of what whales are saying by studying their calls. Some of the calls are captured by a tag, like this one seen on a killer whale. If you've watched Finding Nemo, chances are you've tried to speak whale in the drawling singsong of Dory.
But if you failed to master that version of the humpback dialect, you can tune into Whale.fm to hone those underdeveloped marine mammal communication skills.
An international collective of scientists has put together the website that holds 16,000 killer whale and pilot whale calls. The group is enlisting the public or "citizen scientists" to categorize them — and perhaps solve the mystery of what the whales are saying.
The first step is matching the whale calls with similar ones based on audio clips and visual representations of the sound.
"How these animals use the calls is an enigma to us. It looks like there is some animal culture that is passed through the dialects from group to group, but we are just beginning to understand how they function," said Peter Tyack, a professor of marine biology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Some of the calls are captured by a tag attached to the killer whale or pilot whale (which are species of dolphins). The location, some recorded off the coast of British Columbia, and what they were doing at the time are also noted so that scientists can determine if there is any pattern.
Other types of whale songs — like the haunting melodies of the humpback whale — can be categorized by computer programs, said Tyack. But the complex combination of clicks, screeches and squeals that form the calls of killer whales and pilot whales need the human brain to discern the patterns.
"We only have a handful of biologists who do this kind of work and we have tens of thousands of calls," said Tyack.
That's where "citizen science" comes in. Whale.fm is one of several projects using crowd-sourcing to work through huge datasets where human senses are better than computers at picking out patterns. It is run by Zooniverse, a developer of citizen science projects that started in 2007.
The best part about citizen science projects is that they make regular people part of the excitement of scientific research, says Mariette DiChristina, the editor in chief of Scientific American magazine, a partner in Whale.fm.
"You don't need science degree to be a citizen scientist," she said.
Tyack says there is also the advantage of getting help from across the world — reducing the cultural and personal biases individual scientists might bring to categorizing data.
The response to the project so far has been positive, he said. The day after the Nov. 29 launch they got 20,000 matches.
With the data collected, scientists hope to research whether the killer whales and pilot whales have specific dialects within family groups.
They may also get some insight into how commercial shipping, oil drilling and other noisy ocean activities are affecting whale life.
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