The study’s co-author, Josep Call, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, stated, “We wanted to test how adaptable a killer whale is when copying sounds.” “To really test this, we gave them words like ‘hello,’ which an orca would never naturally say, which are entirely outside of their natural repertoire.”
Training Wikie to Copy Sounds
Researchers from the UK, Chile, Spain, and Germany carried out the study, which was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Using the same training approach, researchers prompted her to replicate three specific sounds made by her three-year-old calf, Moana.
