He spent years cataloguing orca families’ unique dialects. Now you can hear them

John Ford has dedicated his life to studying the orcas of the West Coast and their iconic calls.

Now, more than 45 years after he began recording and cataloguing them, a unique online database is allowing anyone to get an earful.

The new tool is raising hopes that sharing the information could help detect the animals and protect them from vessel strikes.

Ford, a scientist emeritus with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, began collecting orca sounds as a graduate student in the late 1970s.

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He found that different subgroups of the marine mammals each used their own unique sets of stereotypical calls to identify one another as a part of the same family group over great distances while hunting and foraging.

“[I] sort of stumbled onto this dialect system where you can actually identify the pod that you’re with by the sounds they make,” he explained.

John was able to break the calls down by various, consistent subgroups from smaller pods and clans through to larger groups like the northern and southern resident populations and Bigg’s, also known as transient orcas.

Those calls, he said, are “really stable” over many years, and are passed down generation to generation through vocal learning.

“We have recordings that the Canadian Navy made back in the 1950s of killer whales in Saanich Inlet, for example, and it was clearly J Pod, which is a very distinctive dialect,” he said.

“They sound just today much like they did back in the 1950s.”

At the time, he catalogued the form of stereograms, which are visual representations of sound waves.

An example of one of the whale calls published in the new catalogue. (Simon Fraser University / HALLO)

Decades later, Simon Fraser University’s HALLO project has published the sounds themselves in an online call catalogue.

The database currently includes calls from Bigg’s, northern and southern residents, and allows users to filter by clan and pod.

John said people who collect whale sounds from a growing network of hydrophones along the coast can now compare them to the catalogue to identify which population they are listening to.

“I published a hard copy of the catalogue with the spectrograms in the late 1980s, but of course, the internet didn’t exist,” he said.

“There was nothing like an opportunity as we have now to to be able to filter through all the different calls and to actually listen to them.”

SFU environmental science professor Ruth Joy said the tool will allow hundreds of citizen scientists who track orca populations to protect them from large vessels.

Researchers have found that ship strikes remain a “significant” cause death among the critically endangered southern resident population, which today numbers just 75 remaining whales.

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“It’s a starting point for starting to get the community to understand the subtleties and the complexity of killer whale language,” she said.

“This kind of drops at the right time for so many people trying to detect those whales and slow vessels down.”

So far, the catalogue does not identify individual whales within family groups, nor does it include a third and less studied population known as offshore orcas.

What the calls, themselves, mean remains elusive to science.

John said he hopes to see the catalogue expand to include more populations, and to see researchers around the world compile similar databases of their own local orca groupings.

“It’s just thrilling for me finally to be able to get this out there and have it available to everybody,” he said.