Orca whistle catalog

Southern Resident killer whales

This is the first draft of a whistle catalog for Southern Resident killer whales. It is free and publicly-accessible by design.

SRKW whistles are rarer than calls, and they typically have a simpler structure and higher fundamental frequencies. Like calls, stereotyped whistles appear to vary in killer whale populations over time and between populations. There are three sources of data that contributed to this catalog:

  1. Riesch et al. (2006) described four stereotyped whistles (SW 01-04) and is the source for the "historic" black-and-white spectrograms in this catalog. Special thanks to Dr. John Ford for providing raw data files from the 2006 publication from which we extracted a good example of SW04 (presented below as an open audio file and corresponding color spectrogram).
  2. Souhaut & Shields (2021) identified three addtional whistles (SW 05-07, and is the source of the black-and-white spectrograms for those whistles.
  3. Orcasound hydrophone recordings (2021 to 2023) is the source of audio files and the color spectrograms, except for SW4 (which we've not yet encountered in the Orcasound archives).

The raw and processed audio files that underly this catalog are provided via the signals-srkw repo on Github. The Python script used to convert audio data to spectrograms was created by Emily Vierling, and is part of Orcasound's signal-catalogue repo.

To encourage easy sharing and improvements, the data and content are licensed via Orcasound's Creative Commons BY-SA-NC and the data and code repositories carry an MIT license. (Please attribute to "Lucy Day, Orcasound" and link to orcasound.net. Contact info@orcasound.net to discuss any commercial use.)

As of February 2024, our next goals are to identify SW07 and add it to the catalog, and to continue to identify and categorize SRKW whistles in the open archives of Orcasound recordings. You can see we've left a placeholder for it!

SW01

First categorized by Riesch et al. (2006)

SW02

First categorized by Riesch et al. (2006)

SW03

First categorized by Riesch et al. (2006)

SW04

First categorized by Riesch et al. (2006)

SW05

First categorized by Souhaut and Shields (2021)

SW06

First categorized by Souhaut and Shields (2021)

SW07

First categorized by Souhaut and Shields (2021)