The reason that protein folding and other large-scale projects (e.g. SETI@Home) work is because there's enough data to go around. I think that these projects a

The reason that protein folding and other large-scale projects (e.g. SETI@Home) work is because there's enough data to go around. I think that these projects are likely bound by the fairly small bits of data they have available. If we could get an open dataset of cetacean sounds along with a tagged assessment of the scenario (i.e. how many were around, were they agitated, etc) then this kind of project could be very interesting.