If there’s one thing we know about animals, it’s the fact that they are highly intelligent. Some animals may even take that intelligence to a level we can’t comprehend, and it seems as if that is where Orcas have gone.
If you’ve ever wanted to talk to the animals like Dr. Doolittle, you probably have been disappointed in any efforts that you made. Sure, you can train an animal to understand your commands and you may know what they want by their actions, but true communication has been elusive.
Now that they have recordings from some of the orcas in captivity, you might just question whether animals are actually able to talk or not. In fact, these killer whales are able to mimic human voices quite easily.
Joseph Call, who co-authored a study published in 2018 explained that researchers wanted to see the flexibility of a killer whale associated with the sounds they make. He said: “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.”
Wikie is a 14-year-old Orca that was used in the research. She was able to mimic the sounds of her calf, so they decided to let her listen to five orca sounds that were unfamiliar to her.
When Wikie heard a human making the sounds of an orca, including six sounds of human speech, including: ‘hello’, ‘Amy’, ‘ah ha’, ‘one, two’ and ‘bye bye’, things took an interesting turn.
It wasn’t long before the killer whale was mimicking the sounds and did two of the human’s phrases quite perfectly. They recorded Wiki making the human speech and some of the not-so-good attempts. You may find the results to be eerie.
After hearing the recordings, many people couldn’t help but speak about how creepy it was.
Call perhaps summed things up best when he 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.” He then added, “We have no evidence that they understand what their ‘hello’ stands for.”