Collecting acoustic recordings is a vital part of the scientific work of the MCR team, but unfortunately a spate of hard drive failures in recent months have threatened our 30+ year collection.
However, a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Emergency Fund is now enabling us to create a more reliable archive with a new tape back-up system. Work is currently underway to copy the 120TBs of project data files onto the new tapes.
Our acoustic data provides insights into the presence, distribution and abundance of a range of species of cetacean in many previously little studied waters, from Morocco to Cyprus, Iceland to the Southern Ocean, Cape Verde to the Caribbean Sea. Recordings include the loud gunshot sounds produced by right whales in the plankton-rich waters off Canada, the rapid clicks of sperm whales from populations in both hemispheres and the first recordings of humpback whale song from two separate populations breeding off Cape Verde. The archive will potentially be used for a wide range of conservation and management projects (by Governments, statutory bodies, scientists and students) to inform the conservation of important marine species.
The British Library Wildlife Sounds Archive hosts a small selection of our recordings for educational and scientific use, and provides access to the public, scientists and educators and display curators who may be interested in the recordings. As part of the current back-up project, selected examples of the recordings will also be made accessible to the public to listen to via our web site (some sounds are available to listen to here). The data is available to third parties for research and conservation projects. Further information on the locations where we have undertaken research projects is available through OBIS SEAMAP .
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