Parrots talking are hardly a surprise anymore - scientists have now identified a whale that is capable of mimicking human speech.
It all started back in 1984, when a diver at the National Marine Mammal Foundation surfaced from the whale tank after hearing someone telling him to get out. As it turned out, no one talked to him, or at least no human. The "out" sound reportedly came from a captive Beluga whale called NOC.
For the next several years, the Foundation recorded the sounds that NOC made, both underwater and when he surfaced. After conducting extensive acoustical analysis, the scientists concluded that NOC's closeness to humans all those years made him lower the frequency of his "voice" to mimic human speech. According to the researchers, "chatting" between whales in the tank sounded very similar to two people having a conversation far away.
By comparing recordings of NOC's sounds to human speech, scientists found that the rhythm of the whale's sound indeed matched that of humans. The whale's pitch, clicks, and whistles were reportedly very similar to human sounds.
NOC made those sounds resembling human speech by making tweaks in the pressures in his nasal cavity and broadening a pair of vibrating lip-like structures in his blowhole. NOC's close proximity to human beings seems to have ultimately lead it to listen and imitate human speech.
Sailors had been telling stories about this beluga behavior for years, calling belugas "sea canaries" for their musical squeaks and chirps. The scientific community, however, adds significantly more weight to the claim that such whales are actually capable of mimicking human sounds.
The study, called Spontaneous human speech mimicry by a cetacean, was published in the journal Current Biology.
"Although dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have been trained to match numbers and durations of human vocal bursts and reported to spontaneously match computer-generated whistles, spontaneous human voice mimicry had not previously been demonstrated," reads a summary of the study.
"We report here sound recordings and analysts which demonstrate spontaneous mimicry of the human voice, presumably a result of vocal learning, by a white whale."
