The question of whether one can conclude just from basilar membrane (BM) vibration data that the cochlea is an active mechanical system is addressed. To this end, a method is developed which computes the power flux through a channel cross section of a short‐wave cochlear model from a given BM vibration pattern. The power flux is an important indicator of mechanical activity because a rise in this function corresponds to creation of mechanical energy. The power flux method is applied to BM velocity patterns as measured by Johnstone and Yates [J. Acoust. Soc. Am.55, 584–587 (1974)] and by Sellicketal. [Hear. Res.10, 101–108 (1983)] in the guinea pig and by Roblesetal. [PeripheralAuditoryMechanisms, edited by J. B. Allen, J. L. Hall, A. E. Hubbard, S. T. Neely, and A. Tubis (Springer, New York, 1986a), pp. 121–128, and J. Acoust. Soc. Am.80, 1364–1374 (1986b)] in the chinchilla. Before the calculations are performed, the BM data are interpolated and smoothed in order to avoid numerical errors as a result of too few and noisy data points. The choice of the smoothing method influences the computed power flux function considerably. Nevertheless, the calculations appear to make a clear distinction between the ‘‘old’’ data, showing broad BM tuning (Johnstone and Yates, 1974), and the ‘‘new’’ data, in which the response is much more peaked (Sellicketal., 1983; Roblesetal., 1986a,b). The former do not give rise to a significant increase of the power flux; the latter do, although less convincingly for the Sellicketal. (1983) data than for the Roblesetal. (1986a,b) data. It is thus concluded that the recently obtained, sharply tuned BM responses reflect the presence of mechanical activity in the cochlea.