Scientists enlisting public's help in identifying whale dialects
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 08:02
in Biology & Nature
(PhysOrg.com) -- In recent years, crowd sourcing has been shown to be an effective means of categorizing large amounts of data by large groups of people, the project that uses captcha’s to help translate text on the Internet, for example, has been a great success. Now, scientists that study whale sounds are asking the public for help in matching whale sounds made by one whale to those made by others in other groups. They hope is that by gathering the ears of many listeners, progress can be made in figuring out if different groups of whales have different dialects, and maybe even in deciphering what some whale sounds actually mean.