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Orcas, commonly known as killer whales, have been successfully trained to imitate human speech.
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers from institutions in Germany, UK, Spain and Chile, describe how they carried out the latest research with Wikie, a 14-year-old female orca living in an aquarium in France. She had previously been trained to copy actions performed by another orca when given a human gesture.
After first brushing up Wikie's grasp of the "copy" command, she was trained to parrot three familiar orca sounds made by her three-year old calf Moana.
Wikie was then additionally exposed to five orca sounds she had never heard before, including noises resembling a creaking door and the blowing a raspberry.
Finally, Wikie was exposed to a human making three of the orca sounds, as well as six human sounds, including "hello", "Amy", "ah ha", "one, two" and "bye bye".
The embedded clip of the audio is pretty interesting. We've all heard birds imitating sounds but the article makes a point that only a fraction of animals have the neural and vocal apparatus to do this.
How long until your next call to customer service gets outsourced to these cetaceans?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:05PM (3 children)
He's not Woody Woodpecker's arch-nemesis.
Or the buzzard from those turn of the 20th century color children's books set against the southwestern desert?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:25PM
I'd go with the buzzards from The Jungle Book. They are a bit nasty until they realize a shared suffering, then they do a turnabout.
I'm just hopeful, but I won't hold my breath.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:26PM (1 child)
Daddy's favorite buzzard cartoon. [blogspot.com]
Still applicable over half a century later.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:39PM
But only when asked to pay taxes!