Killer whales able to copy words such as ‘hello’ and ‘bye bye’ as well as sounds from other orcas, study shows.
This is a really cool study - but it’s important to be very precise about what it does and does not conclude.
What this study indicates: some orcas are capable of mimicking sounds they hear other animals produce, which indicates a capacity for vocal learning.
What this study does not indicate: that all orcas are definitely capable of mimicking sounds they hear other animals produce (this is a case study of a single individual, so while it is probable most orcas can do so, this specific piece of research does not prove that), that orcas understand human speech, or that orcas will mimic human speech to communicate with humans.
I’m working on getting a copy of the paper, but for now, here’s what information we have from the article and the abstract of the paper: a 14-year-old orca named Wikie, who lives in a facility in France, was taught to generalize a ‘copy me’ cue she knew previously from the meaning “imitate the other whale’s actions” to also meaning she should mimic noises that other whales or her trainers made.
“After first brushing up Wikie’s grasp of the “copy” command,” the Guardian article says, “she was trained to parrot three familiar orca sounds made by her three-year old calf Moana. Wikie was then additionally exposed to five orca sounds she had never heard before, including noises resembling a creaking door and the blowing a raspberry.Finally, Wikie was exposed to a human making three of the orca sounds, as well as six human sounds, including “hello”, “Amy”, “ah ha”, “one, two” and “bye bye”. (…) Throughout the study, Wikie’s success was first judged by her two trainers and then confirmed from recordings by six independent adjudicators who compared them to the original sound, without knowing which was which.The team found that Wikie was often quickly able to copy the sounds, whether from an orca or a human, with all of the novel noises mimicked within 17 trials.”
While the co-author of the study notes that this may be the first evidence we have that orcas are learning sounds by vocal imitation, there are a number of extant anecdotes that support that hypothesis.
A study published in 2014 noted that orcas who had been housed with bottlenose dolphins for a number of years both started using calls types more frequently that were similar to the types of calls made by bottlenose dolphins (clicks and whistles) and used call types less frequently that bottlenose dolphins don’t make (pulsed calls). What’s more, one orca learned to produce a chirp sequence that had been taught to the bottlenose dolphins before they were housed together.
Luna (L98), an orphaned killer whale calf who lived off of the west coast of Vancouver Island in the Nootka Sound, was thought to be making calls that mimicked the barking of sea lions. While researchers were never able to definitively prove that Luna was mimicking another species of marine mammal, multiple calls matching the spectrograms and repetition pattern consistent with sea lions were recorded in the Sound - however, these had a much wider range of harmonics than normal sea lion calls, were included in bouts of calling that included typical killer whale vocalizations, and were recorded in the absence of sea lions but when Luna was known to be present.
If you listen to the video, it’s obvious that Wikie isn’t actually pronouncing the words she’s being asked to copy - instead, she’s mainly mimicking the tone and emphasis patterns of the researcher she’s copying. The video doesn’t show us all six of the human sounds she was asked to mimic, but instead we get to hear her copying different intonations of the same phrase: the same words said twice, once with a rising intonation and once with descending vocal pattern. And we get to hear her blow a raspberry, because who wouldn’t want to hear a whale mimic that?
Overall, this is super cool new research - but it needs to not be blown out of proportion. What we’re learning from this is that orcas are capable of learning new vocalizations from the animals around them, and not even just from their conspecifics. That’s really important information about how they communicate - it gives more import, for instance, to the fact that matrilineal groups will increase the frequency of their use of calls specific to their family group after the birth of a new calf - but we have to interpret it through an orca-specific lens, not an anthropomorphic one.
This study isn’t about orcas learning or understanding human language, or the beginning of being able to speak to humans - Wikie is just copying sounds she’s been asked to reproduce - but the fact that orcas have the capacity for vocal learning is still incredibly important. This type of study is vital for helping humans see the world through the experience of an orca - but to really understand it, we have to make sure we don’t interpret orca life through a human lens. That’s a building block of language that not a lot of animals have, and it gets us one step closer to understanding how orcas interact with the world around them.
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