Haunting recording of orcas imitating human speech is leaving people terrified

Creepy recordings show orcas appearing to mimic human speech.

When it comes to scarily intelligent animals, orcas have to be up there with ones that give us the (free) willies.

Any creature the very presence of which sends Great White Sharks scurrying into the depths in terror is one that should be treated with a lot of respect.

Orcas are astonishingly effective hunters as well, and have been observed hunting everything from herring all the way up to an adult Blue Whale, yes not even the largest animal in the world is safe from these monochromatic menaces.

A large part of orcas' success in hunting comes from their formidable intelligence, allowing them to co-operate in their hunting.

And some individuals have been observed emulating human words.

The experiment saw the orcas manage to imitate human speech (Abramson et. al/CBS News)

A recording from a 2018 study shows an orca mimicking human words such as 'hello' and 'bye bye'.

Josep Call works at the University of St Andrews as a professor in evolutionary origins of mind, an astonishingly cool job title, and explained that researchers working on the study wanted to understand the killer whale's ability to copy noises.

In the Guardian, Professor Call said: "We thought what would be really convincing is to present them with something that is not in their repertoire - and in this case ‘hello’ [is] not what a killer whale would say."

Wikie the Orca

Researchers trained 14-year-old orca Wikie to copy three sounds made by her three-year-old calf, before exposing her to five orca sounds that she had not heard before.

Eventually Wikie listened to a human making orca noises, followed by six human sounds such as 'hello', 'Amy', 'ah ha', 'one, two' and 'bye bye'.

Remarkably, the team observed that Wikie was quickly able to copy the orca sounds, and even managed to get two human words correct on her very first try.

In the wild orcas, which are technically not whales but the largest member of the dolphin family, use a huge number of vocalisations to communicate with other.

These include repeated refrains which can be used to identify members of a pod.

If an orca could speak, what would they say? (Abramson et. al/CBS News)

Amazingly, different pods of orcas in the same area have been observed to use similar patterns of calls, which are different to other areas.

This means that orcas could be said to have 'regional accents' when it comes to the way that they communicate with each other.

But as for the orca's accent with a human word, some viewers had strong feelings about it, with one saying: "The hello sounded demonic.”

A second joked: "Was that really an orca, or the Devil speaking through a ghost box LOL The funniest and scariest thing EVER! That’s my day, can’t stop laughing my head off lol."

Another was left moved by Wikie, writing: "This makes me tear up, the fact that we live in a such a beautiful world filled with wonderful creatures."

Can the orcas understand the words?

The short answer is that no, or least there is no evidence to suggest it.

Nonetheless, Call was impressed by her ability to emulate human sounds given how different our bodies are.

"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," said the professor.

But Call still added as a caveat: "We have no evidence that they understand what their ‘hello’ stands for.”