Dear friends and colleagues,

My co-authors and I are pleased to announce the publication of our annotated killer whale call dataset in Scientific Data. The dataset contains raw audio, annotation bounds, and labels for over 200k killer whale, humpback whale, and other species, as well as a variety of abiotic sounds. This compilation represents a collaboration between NGOs, academia, commercial organizations, and government entities, who have graciously contributed their data and expertise to this effort. These data will be part of the challenge set for the 2027 meeting and workshop on the detection, classification, localization, and density estimation of marine mammals using passive acoustics. The details of the challenge will be forthcoming in the coming months, but in the meantime we invite the community to begin exploring this resource.