“He would probably only be able to hear human speech when someone was in his cage, submerged, and holding dive gear in their mouth.
It sounds precisely like that if you’ve ever attempted to converse while swimming. You would be wrong if you believed that.
This was an isolated instance. An audio tape from 2018 that showed an orca mimicking human speech in a similarly unsettling manner was made public earlier this year.
A scientific research that was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences journal included the recording.
Together, researchers from Chile, Germany, Spain, and the UK documented their results, proving that orcas can imitate human speech. Josep Call, a co-author of the research and a professor.
