I'm very confused as to why. According to Finder these have an 8kHz sample rate? How did they find a mic that bad?

Or is it intentional? Is there some scientific usefulness that would make these clips easier for a machine to analyze? I really don't know if there would be, since a higher resolution clip could just be sampled again if you really wanted something lower.

It is very unfortunate, but I'm grateful that someone performed this experiment as ethically as they could think of and made the data available for all to use.