Like all good killer whales, Wikie the orca can leap and dive on demand. She can take fish from her trainer’s hand, and temporarily beach herself to greet the crowds. But when she does meet her fans, she can also now do something no other killer whale can do: say hello.
Scientists have successfully trained Wikie, who lives in a French aquarium, to talk. In a paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B they describe how after only a few tries she was able to make a passable attempt at repeating words such as “hello”, “bye bye”, “one two three”, and blow a perfect raspberry.
Her diction was not quite to human standards but the words were still recognisable — putting killer whales in a rare group of animals that can imitate sounds. These include parrots and crows, but not non-human primates.
The researchers were interested in this ability because of growing evidence that killer whales construct their own languages. Different pods seem to use different sounds to communicate, and these vary according to where they live. More than that, there is anecdotal evidence that when killer whales with different languages meet they can acquire each other’s “words”.
One Icelandic female was put in a tank with a Russian whale, and after several years they matched each other’s calls. Two juveniles have also been spotted mimicking the barks of sea lions.
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The scientists said that the ability of killer whales to communicate had probably been underestimated, given that Wikie had learnt how to make the sounds in the air, despite evolving to “talk” underwater.
They added: “It can be argued that because our experimental design included in-air (rather than in-water) sounds, the positive results obtained cannot directly reflect the killer whales’ capacity for learning to copy underwater sounds in their natural environment.”
So before you decide to criticise the killer whales’ above-water elocution, see how good you are at imitating a killer whale with your head in a swimming pool.