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Scientific American Needs Your Help to Identify Whale Calls

We know that whales communicate through the magic of song. Sometimes using frequencies that the human ear can not even detect, whales have been known to communicate over hundreds of miles. Some scientists have even claimed that their ability to teach specific songs to their pods and transfer those songs between groups constitutes a form of culture.

Despite what we do know about whale songs, most of them are still a mystery. Scientific American and Zooniverse are teaming up for a citizen science project, where you can help them classify whale songs.

Thousands of whale songs are collected each year from remote aquatic microphones, but researchers can’t depend on computers to match them up perfectly. On the whale.fm website, you can listen to whale calls and help match them to different sounds in the database. This will help classify the sounds by location and species.

Click here to participate in the Whale Song Project at whale.fm.

Wait, the Zooniverse where Howard and Vince used to work?