Off The Record
The Unsettling Video Of Orcas Mimicking Human Speech Is Frightening And Amazing At The Same Time
In addition to being the biggest member of the dolphin family, killer whales are regarded as some of the most formidable aquatic apex predators on the planet. However, did you know that they have the ability to speak?
According to National Geographic, orcas, sometimes referred to as killer whales, have developed the ability to swim up to 40 kilometers a day. They have the greatest brain of any marine animal and are capable of hunting on land.
But here’s something you might not know about orcas: it seems that they can mimic simple human words like “hello” and “goodbye.”
Orcas mimicking human language
Experts from Germany, Spain, the UK, and Chile documented how they found orcas could replicate human language in a 2018 study that was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
According to co-author Josep Call, a professor of evolutionary origins of mind at the University of St Andrews, the researchers’ original goal was to determine “how flexible a killer whale can be” in mimicking unfamiliar noises.
“We thought what would be really convincing is to present them with something that is not in their repertoire – and in this case ‘hello’ [is] not what a killer whale would say,” Call told The Guardian.
In order to conduct the study, the scientists first trained a 14-year-old orca named Wikie to mimic three orca sounds that her three-year-old calf had previously made. After that, they exposed her to five orca sounds that she had never heard before.
The human sounds the orca was able to say
Finally, Wikie heard a human make three orca sounds, then six human sounds including the words ‘hello’, ‘Amy’, ‘ah ha’, ‘one, two’ and ‘bye bye’.
The study discovered that the orca could rapidly mimic the sounds after hearing Wikie’s answers, even correctly mimicking two of the human statements on the first try.
Wikie’s attempts to imitate the human speaking to her are captured on tape; some of these attempts, while admittedly coming from a fearsome goblin, are surprisingly accurate.
Listeners have been left unnerved by the recordings, with one viewer commenting, “The hello sounded demonic.”
And another joked, “OK, that second hello was a little demonic. Was that really an orca, or the Devil speaking through a ghost box LOL The funniest and scariest thing EVER! That’s my day, can’t stop laughing my head off lol.”
Despite the videos’ eerie sound, several viewers have praised the whale’s incredible human-mimicking abilities.
“This makes me tear up, the fact that we live in a such a beautiful world filled with wonderful creatures,” a reader remarked.
The results were the first indication that orcas might be learning sounds through vocal imitation, even if Wikie only successfully imitated the human sound “hello” more over 50% of the time on subsequent trials.
“This is something that could be the basis of the dialects we observe in the wild—it is plausible,” Call said.
Can orcas understand what these sounds mean?
The fact that Wiki’s vocal apparatus differs greatly from that of humans just serves to highlight how amazing her responses are.
Call continued, “Even though the morphology [of orcas] is so different, they can still produce a sound that comes close to what another species, in this case us, can produce.“
That being said, Call added, “We have no evidence that they understand what their ‘hello’ stands for.”
Call also out that more studies with wild orcas would be necessary to have a better understanding of how orcas learn sounds, even though the research with Wikie has provided some preliminary insight.
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