Dear Colleagues, I am writing to you today to ask whether you would be able to either do an evaluation of spectrogram similarity and/or whether you know of anyone who might be interested in doing so and perhaps would be so nice to forward this message. I am studying acoustic call dialect similarities among killer whale communities in the northeastern Pacific. The call dialects appear to be learned and the degree of call similarity roughly matches both social distance and maternal relatedness among groups within communities. The first part of my study deals with dialect similarity among groups of non-associating communities, the second one deals with the question of whether dialect divergence is solely a product of drift (in this case cultural drift) or whether selection (again cultural selection) plays a role in the existing dialect similarity. To help me out you would need to go to the following web site http://www.blackfish-acoustics.org/ and if you have a moment do as many of the presented spectrogram similarity evaluations as you can. Your participation in this evaluation procedure is greatly appreciated. I am also interested in any comment you might have about the procedure and the other context on the web site, but I already apologize for not being able to respond right away to every comment I might receive. I will, of course, respond to inquiries containing problems with the evaluations. I am in total thesis writing mode and time is running through my fingers. Thanks so much for your help and understanding.
Cheers, Harald ___________________________ Harald Yurk Department of Zoology & Marine Mammal Research Unit University of British Columbia 6270 University Boulevard Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4 phone: 604.787.4951 fax: 604.822.2416
