Marine Mammal
Choir
Thean, Tara. "Caller IDs for Whales." : Oceanus
Magazine. N.p., 25 June 2013. Web. 20 Oct. 2013. https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/caller-ids-for-whales.
A Summary:
Marine mammal scientists have
recently been collecting recordings of calls from whales, killer whales,
dolphins, and many other marine mammals. They have been able to organize all of
these calls into different call types, noticing many that were similar. This
takes time and effort to be able to consume and organize all these different
calls into their own categories.
Tara Thean got to experience this
through a fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in 2012.
She spent hundreds of hours over many weeks organizing 3,127 recordings on her
own. A WHOI research specialist, Laela Sayigh and her colleagues from the
University of St. Andrews took the task of coding 4,000 pilot whale calls into
different categories through crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing took place
Zooniverse, a science hub that asked the public to help classify galaxy images
from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope according to their shapes. The team realized
they could do the same with the marine mammal sounds and decided to go along
with the idea. This lead to the spawning of Whale FM (link).
This is a website where literally they are asking people, “What are the whales
saying?”
There was no need to gather up
volunteers because people were instantly intrigued. After the fall of 2011, over
10,000 people have been going on this website, connecting whale sounds to
others they found similar by putting a check next to them, or putting an “X” if
they did find a similarity. All around the world, visitors have summed up to
match 30 different whale calls per visit, categorizing almost 200,000 calls.
The scientists believe that this could easily be a spot-the-difference game for
people all around.
Early work suggests, that
scientists will be able to automate the classification process through
mathematical algorithms. Researcher Arik Kershenbaum is experimenting with
human music recognition to codify dolphin whistles. Even advanced computers
seem to have trouble categorizing the whistles and tend to lose all the subtle
differences each recording seems to have. These forgotten features that
computers seem to lose are extremely important because they are consistent.
Dolphins have small blips in their
whistles from one year to the other and it seems the dolphins keep those blips
n their whistles every year. The computer will often make the mistake of saying
two whistles are coming from different dolphins, when really they are from the
same one, just changed certain things about its whistle. Changes in the duration
or looping. The dolphin might repeat its first whistle, make it one long
whistle, or multi-loop it. The computer will take a 3-loop whistle and a 4-loop
whistle from the same dolphin and say they are different dolphins.
Six years later Sayigh was able to
give a rebuttal on the debate saying that humans despite being a naïve judge
can indeed sort out and group together dolphin whistles. In 2012, another study
claimed to prove that people were accurately able to match vocalizations, 74%
of the time.
At the end of the article you can take a look at different
dolphin whistles and sort them out for yourself!
Relevancy:
There
are a couple of reasons why a person would think this could have relevance to
society. I found this to be increasingly interesting to think not only does
this contribute to the studies of marine mammal noises and communications, but
also to therapeutic and psychological factors of the human mind. People were
able to codify marine mammal calls better than an advanced computer. This shows
relevance to society through how we communicate and how we can tell the
difference between tones and duration. This happens everyday. We assume things
about each other through the tone that we’re saying something in, or how long
it takes us to say it. Because we practice this deducing skill everyday, we
have an ability with codifying it in animals. This could eventually, in good
time, lead to better communication with marine mammals, or maybe even other
animals of different species. It seems like it could be a possible
breakthrough. Studies have shown that dolphins are some of the smartest animals
in the world; this clearly proves that and furthers the argument of how smart
they really are. Dolphins might be used as something more than just test, but
as devices for communication and further research on groups of dolphins
together and their communication. Letting normal people sort out different
recordings could also lead to more scientists. People easily get inspired. If
they continue to go on the website to codify more and more dolphin whistles it
could easily motivate them to contribute to this science department. From
donating funds for more research, to becoming part of the team to test more
experiments, it might just take one person to make an outstanding breakthrough
in the marine world.
Critique:
I
have both positive and negative opinions on this article. I would love to start
by saying that this was truly one of the only articles that really sucked me in
from the beginning. It was a bore for me to read in anyway. In fact, I’m glad
we had to do this current event because if not, I would have never had the
motivation of finding this great article! The idea of being able to observe
communication from a completely different life is fascinating beyond
words. The fact that scientist
were able to record dolphins and whales making the sounds they make everyday
and being able to depict their differences is a weird thing to reads at first.
But as soon as they start explaining it more and elaborating on how it’s done
and by what standards it’s being codified, it becomes really simple and fun. I
actually did it myself. I listened to a few of the whale calls (link above)
that were already sorted and didn’t feel the need to argue why one was grouped
with the other three. It seems hard but it’s actually really easy to tell it’s
coming from the same whale. I recommend you try it when you get the chance.
Some
more negative factors of the article was that I wish they went into more depth
about the variations of the calls. Yes they did talk about it a little bit but
the author was too vague for me and I felt I wanted more specification on how
dolphin whistles and whale calls can be. It was like I was being lured into it
but as soon as I am completely indulged in knowing more about something they
said in the article, they immediately went to a different topic about it. This
was a little irritating for me and I felt that the author should have been more
consistent with telling the information instead of automatically going into an
opinion the experiment. I also got a little zoned out when it talked about other
papers that wrote based on the test that WHOI was doing. They lost me with the
boring and usual comment, “This is isn’t true” that a couple of the papers
wrote. I didn’t really care for the opinions as much as I cared for the actual
process and the results that average people got while doing the sorting.
I
felt that they should have definitely been more consistent with what the
different things you van look for in a marine mammal’s call and spent less time
on the pessimistic views of other science papers. I’m not saying that they
should have excluded outside opinions completely, just spent a lot less time on
it and spent more time on the actual experience, the test, the research and all
that.
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