Study shows some whales can mimic human voice

Parrots and mynah birds may soon have to welcome a big new member into the club of animals that can mimic human speech – the whale. A new study has shown some whales can imitate human voices, citing the case of a white whale named NOC, according to a report on Discovery News. "They are highly vocal animals," lead author Sam Ridgway of the National Marine Mammal Foundation said in an interview with Discovery News. Discovery News cited the experience of one diver who worked with NOC who left the water wondering, "Who told me to get out?" – and later learning it was NOC. But Ridgway added that while NOC mimicked human voices so well the researchers thought at first they were hearing humans talking, it was not the first to copy human speech. He cited a "major instance" in 1979 at Vancouver Aquarium, where people thought a whale named Lagosi uttered his name and other sounds "like garbled German or Russian." Although NOC was the "second example," he said NOC was the first solid demonstration using "acoustic analysis including 'voice print' simultaneously with human speech." NOC stopped making human speech-like sounds after the age of 3 or 4. He had died after 30 years at the National Marine Mammal Foundation. The possible reasons included hormonal changes related to sexual maturity that diminished his urges to mimic, and the novelty might have worn off. Vocalizations Discovery News said the study, featured in the latest issue of Current Biology, showed an amplitude rhythm in NOC's vocalizations comparable to human speech. Ridgway noted NOC spent long periods in close contact with humans, listening to them from both above and below the surface. "The whale often heard divers talking over underwater communication equipment. I think that vocal animals like feedback. Perhaps this figured in his motivation," he said. But Ridgway also noted NOC took much trouble to make the sounds, having to "vary the pressure in his nasal tract while making other muscular adjustments and inflating the vestibular sac in his blowhole." Also, he said they had trained the whale to interact with humans acoustically for hearing test and for reaction time determinations. "For this new work, the whale was responding to us vocally. These responses may have limited his interest in the human speech-like sounds," he said. The late William Schevill of Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, the first to document spontaneous human voice mimicry in a white whale, and colleague Barbara Lawrence had also noted that "occasionally the calls would suggest a crowd of children shouting in the distance." Discovery News quoted Ridgway as saying that while the findings open up the possibility of teaching white whales how to speak, but that effort might not be worthwhile. "They readily learn. I think they could be taught many sounds. I do not know that teaching speech would be scientifically worthwhile," he said. — LBG, GMA News