Talking to parrots, mynahs or sometimes even dogs and cats is not something novel. Birds, especially parrots are known to imitate and respond to human speech very well but in a first, killer whales have responded to human speech! If you say hello to Wikie, a 14-year old female killer whale at an aquarium in France and you might actually get a reply! The orca at the Marineland Aquarium is being trained to copy speech and human behaviours.

Wikie can say at least 5 words including the name of her trainer Amy. Researchers have been studying the ability of ocras to imitate human sounds. Scientists say that these big whales could also copy the sound of another orca in the wild. This study was to understand how whales learn even in their natural habitat. “Killer whales use their blowhole to make noises, almost like speaking out of your nose, so we were not expecting it to be perfect. But we were surprised by how close it was,” said Dr Jose Abramson, a researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, who has led the study. The findings of this study have been recorded in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Watch the video of killer whale's speech ability to mimic humans:

Wikie after listening to her trainer was requested to reproduce the sounds and she was pretty close. While she took 17 attempts to get the sounds right, she got the words ‘hello’ and ‘one two three’ right on the very first attempt. In previous researches it was found that the fish has the ability to imitate sea lion and dolphin sounds but this is the first time such an experiment was conducted in a controlled environment. Wikie knew that when her trainer made a particular gesture she was to imitate the behaviour. Wikie was trained to noises like "Ah ah," "hello," "bye-bye," "Amy," "one-two" and "one-two-three." Wikie’s sounds were compared on audio spectrograms and a lot of similarities were seen in them. This study puts light on vocals sounds and imitation as a way of frequent communication between the whales.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Feb 02, 2018 07:02 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).