A 14-year-old orca whale named Wilkie has learned how to “speak” to humans.
Wilkie, who lives at a whale aquarium in France, was able to imitate a human saying “hello,” “bye bye” and “one, two” after working with a team of researchers from the UK, Spain, Chile and Germany.
“Killer whales use their blowhole to make noises, almost like speaking out of your nose, so we were not expecting it to be perfect,” Jose Abramson, the study’s lead author, told The Independent. “But we were surprised by how close it was.”
This isn’t the first time animals have learned how to imitate human sounds. Scientists have documented elephants, parrots, orangutans, dolphins and beluga whales all mimicking our words and noises – but this study marks a first for orca whales. The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Wilkie had already been trained to copy the actions of a fellow orca whale. Once the scientists reacquainted her with how to mimic an action, they had her repeat three familiar sounds made by her 3-year-old calf, Moana. Next, they had her make five orca sounds she had never heard before, which included a creaking door noise and one that resembled someone blowing a raspberry.
Then the researchers had Wilkie copy the orca sounds made by a human and, finally, the aforementioned words as well as “ah ha” and her trainer’s name, “Amy.”
Wilkie was quickly able to copy all the sounds and words, with no more than 17 trials for each. Some she was even able to imitate on the first try.
“I think here we have the first evidence that killer whales may be learning sounds by vocal imitation,” Josep Call, a co-author on the study, told the Guardian. “And this is something that could be the basis of the dialects we observe in the wild – it is plausible.”
Unfortunately, even though Wilkie is able to say “hello,” it doesn’t mean she gets what she’s doing.
“We have no evidence that they understand what their ‘hello’ stands for,” Call said.