Researchers fed an orca six human noises, and what they received in response was astounding, if a little unsettling.
The recordings are from a study on orcas’ ability to mimic human speech, which discovered that killer whales can duplicate us fairly well.
Josep Call, a co-author of the published study, noted that the researchers sought to understand ‘how adaptable a killer whale can be’ when it comes to duplicating 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 said, per The Guardian.
The researchers conducted the study by first teaching a 14-year-old orca named Wikie to mimic three common orca noises made by her three-year-old calf, and then introducing her to five orca sounds she had never heard before.
Finally, Wikie heard a person produce three orca sounds followed by six human sounds, including the words ‘hello’, ‘Amy’, ‘ah ha’, ‘one, two’, and ‘bye bye’.
After listening to Wikie’s responses, the scientists discovered that the orca could quickly mimic the noises, even nailing two of the human statements on the first try.
While only one human sound, ‘hello’, was accurately generated more than half of the time on subsequent trials, the findings provided the first indication that orcas learn sounds through vocal imitation.
‘This is something that could be the basis of the dialects we observe in the wild – it is plausible,’ Call said.
‘Wikie’s responses are even more astounding given how different her vocal equipment is from humans’.
Call said: ‘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.’
Written by Murray Swart for Cape Town ETC.
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