At some point, most people have probably wondered what it would sound like if a killer whale tried to speak. The answer, it turns out, is somewhere between genuinely impressive and the kind of thing you might hear in a horror film.
Scientists carried out a study, published in 2018, examining the ability of orcas to mimic human speech. The research was led by a team who wanted to understand just how flexible killer whales are when it comes to copying sounds entirely outside their natural repertoire.
"We thought what would be really convincing is to present them with something that is not in their repertoire," said Josep Call, a co-author of the study. "In this case 'hello' is not what a killer whale would say."
The research centred on a 14-year-old orca named Wikie, who was first trained to copy three familiar orca sounds made by her three-year-old calf. She was then exposed to five orca sounds she had never heard before. Finally, researchers played Wikie recordings of a human making three orca sounds, followed by six human sounds: hello, Amy, ah ha, one two, and bye bye.
The results were striking. Wikie was able to copy the sounds quickly, nailing two of the human utterances on her very first attempt. Only the word hello was correctly produced more than 50 percent of the time on subsequent trials, but even that alone was enough to impress and unsettle those who heard the recordings.
The audio of Wikie attempting to mimic her human trainer has since circulated widely online, and listener reactions have been split fairly evenly between awe and genuine discomfort.
"The hello sounded demonic," one person wrote. Another said: "OK, that second hello was a little demonic. Was that really an orca, or the Devil speaking through a ghost box? The funniest and scariest thing EVER."
Others took a more emotional view of the whole thing. "This makes me tear up," one viewer wrote. "The fact that we live in such a beautiful world filled with wonderful creatures."
What makes Wikie's achievement particularly remarkable is the significant difference between orca and human vocal anatomy. The two species produce sound in fundamentally different ways, making any degree of accurate mimicry a notable feat.
"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," Call said.
He was careful to add, however, that the team has no evidence Wikie understands what she is saying. "We have no evidence that they understand what their 'hello' stands for," he noted.
The broader implication of the research is potentially significant. Scientists believe vocal imitation of this kind could be the foundation of the distinct dialects observed between different wild orca populations, where pods develop their own unique calls and sounds passed down through generations.
"This is something that could be the basis of the dialects we observe in the wild," Call said. "It is plausible."
Further trials with wild orcas would be needed to explore this fully, but the initial findings with Wikie offered the first concrete evidence that killer whales are capable of learning sounds by copying other species, including, apparently, us.
