Select the “Listen Live” button above to listen for whales.

As an Orcasound community scientist, there a many ways you can help conserve marine species and help increase stewardship and scientific understanding of the Salish Sea:

1) Participate in a community science project

  • Use the Orcasound web app to help listen for whales. When you let us know when you hear killer whales or other interesting sounds, you help a cooperative team of educators, researchers, stewards, AI, and dynamic software protect and conserve marine life, especially the endangered Southern Resident killer whales. In version 3 of the web app, just select the “REPORT SOUND” button to share your observations! You can also select the “GET NOTIFIED” button to receive alerts about live-listening opportunities and ways to take conservation action yourself.

2) Listen to recorded sounds

If you don’t hear anything interesting live, you can learn to recognize common Salish Sea sounds or read about past events and acoustic analyses in the Orcasound blog.

You are also welcome to browse through Orcasound’s growing archive of processed audio data. We also are increasing the amount of open audio data that has been labeled to help accelerate the development of artificial intelligence (AI) to help human listeners detect interesting sounds under the sea.

You may also browse through our collection of historic recordings from the locations we monitored in the early years of the network:

3) Participate in your local sighting networks

Visual observations of marine animals that make sound underwater are valuable in contextualizing what we hear through the hydrophones. You can share your observations of killer whales, humpbacks, and other marine species in Puget Sound and the Salish Sea by joining a local sighting network or using a regional sighting app.

As of 2024, here is our short list of recommended ways to share visual observations as a community scientist in or near Washington State:


4) Listen to other live and near-real-time audio streams:

5) Provide general feedback:

You can take a quick survey to help us improve!