Crowdsourcing Experiment Seeks to Translate Whale Songs

What, science expects us to give something back?

A team of (lazy?) marine researchers is calling on the Internet to help them sift through 15,000 songs sang by pilot and killer whales to determine any new phrases. The Whale Project, launched by Scientific American magazine, is open to any amateur marine biologists out there who want to test their luck at decoding the songs of the sea. Head on over to whale.fm to hear some of the songs and compare them to others to see if there are any phrases that seem to be repeated. If so, your work could be featured in the lexicon of whale-speak, most of which seems to be saying "food over there." The point of the project is to determine specific "dialects" among the various pods and populations of killer whales and pilot whales, both of which have among the most complex songs, even if we really prefer their earlier stuff.