Extraordinary audio captures killer whale mimicking human speech
Extraordinary audio has captured the moment that a killer whale successfully mimicked human speech for the first time.
In the footage, 14-year-old female killer whale Wikie is heard mimicking English words such as ‘hello’, ‘bye bye’, and the name of her trainer, Amy.
Wikie achieved the groundbreaking feat after scientists exposed her to human sounds in a bid to understand how capable whales are of imitating noises as part of a wider effort to understand how they learn in their own habitat.
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"Killer whales use their blowhole to make noises, almost like speaking out of your nose, so we were not expecting it to be perfect," Complutense University of Madrid lead researcher Dr Jose Abramson said.
"But we were surprised by how close it was."
After initially listening to the human sound, Wikie was asked to reproduce them by her trainer who instructed her to ‘do this’.
Researchers then asked human judges to compare the original sounds with Wikie’s attempts, before they were subsequently ran through computer algorithms in order to fully understand the similarities.
Dr Abramson added: "We are looking at what these animals can do.
"There is evidence of vocal imitation in the wild, and this provides experimental evidence that supports that."
