Sun December 4, 2011 Name That Tune: Identifying Whale Songs For
Science Researchers in the field of marine biology are turning
to citizen scientists, sitting at home in front of your
computer, to help unlock the secrets of whale songs. In Pixar's
aquatic adventure Finding Nemo, Dory, voiced by Ellen Degeneres,
attempts to communicate with a whale to find the missing title
character. She speaks in a loud, slow drawl to the whale, but
when that fails, she says, "Maybe a different dialect." "We
actually know that killer whales do use dialects," marine
biologist Peter Tyack tells Weekend Edition host Audie Cornish.
Despite the tongue-in-cheek depiction of whale songs, Tyack says
the film got it right. "We don't know what the sounds mean, but
each killer whale family has its own set of calls, like a
dialect in human language," he says. Tyack, a marine biologist
at the University of St. Andrews, is also a coordinator of
Whale.fm, a new online experiment that's recruiting citizen
scientists to study killer and pilo