Queen’s Anniversary Prize for SMRU

Photo provided by Kristal Digital

The University of St Andrews was one of 18 universities and 3 further education colleges to receive the Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education. St Andrews won the honour for the Sea Mammal Research Unit’s (SMRU) ‘Research and teaching to promote better governance of the ocean’. SMRU was recognized for its focus on applied research into key environmental issues. It has been a world leader over many years in work aimed at understanding and improving the global marine environment and has influenced governmental approaches to conservation and better ocean governance. Professor Ian Boyd represented SMRU at the Buckingham Palace presentations, made by the Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, on 25 February 2012.

Do whales have dialects?

Scientists at the University of St Andrews are asking the public to help them solve the mystery of the way whales communicate.
Researchers from the University’s Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) want curious 'citizen scientists' across the world to get involved in listening to and helping classify the calls of killer whales and the lesser known pilot whales. 'Citizen scientists' are being urged to listen to and help classify sounds made by the mammals and it aims to establish whether calls vary between different groups of whales. Interested individuals who log on are presented with a whale call and shown where it was recorded on a map of the world's oceans and seas. After listening to the whale call, members of the public are then asked to listen to a number of potential matching calls from the project's database.

If a match is found the results are stored.

Download: Whale sound extract from SMRU - Whale transients (MP3, 831 KB)

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The study is part of the Whale Project: a global effort to categorise whale calls, co-sponsored by the science magazine Scientific American.

Queen’s Anniversary Prize for SMRU

The Sea Mammal Research Unit, a world-leading centre in applied research, has been declared among the winners in the Diamond Jubilee Round of The Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in recognition of its active role in the promotion of best practice in the health and governance of the ocean environment. SMRU’s academic staff and teams of postgraduate students use innovative monitoring techniques to track the effect that human exploitation of the oceans has upon marine mammals, and particularly upon seals, whales and dolphins. As the consequences of this exploitation become ever more apparent, research undertaken at SMRU makes a vital contribution to the formation of national policies. [press link]