Amazing! Killer Whales Can Learn To Speak Like Dolphins

The killer whale is famous for its complex clicks and whistles that can sometimes resemble a haunting song. However the latest research suggests that they also have the ability to learn “dolphin speak”. Some species such as human beings have the ability to imitate new sounds and use them correctly socially. This is the foundation of language and is known as vocal learning.

Some species can vocally learn

The ability to learn vocally is present in some birds, bats and cetaceans, which is a group that includes porpoises, dolphins and whales. Some scientists that study birds have been able to identify which neural pathways are responsible for learning bird song. However it is much more difficult to study language learning in large marine animals the researchers say.

There is evidence now that killer whales have the ability to vocally learn from other species. The researchers socialised killer whales with bottle-nose dolphins at a water facility and what they found was the whales altered the types of sounds they made to resemble the dolphins.

How killer whales talk

Killer whales generally vocalise through a series of whistles, clicks and pulsed calls that are usually followed by periods of silence. The pulse pattern, pitch and duration of their calls vary across pods which indicates each group of whales has its own unique dialect.

“There’s been an idea for a long time that killer whales learn their dialect, but it isn’t enough to say they all have different dialects so therefore they learn. There needs to be some experimental proof so you can say how well they learn and what context promotes learning.” study researcher Ann Bowles, a senior research scientist at Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute said.

Bottle-nose dolphins sound a lot like killer whales

The researchers felt the bottle-nose dolphin was the perfect animal for the experiment because they produce sounds that are a lot like the sounds made by the killer whale, except they make them in different proportions. For examples dolphins make more whistles and clicks, whilst killer whales tend to make more pulsed calls.

• The researchers collected some killer whale sound recordings from three whales that shared space for several years with bottle-nose dolphins.
• The researchers then compared those recordings with sounds collected from a group of control bottle-nose dolphins and killer whales which had not commingled.
• What was found was that the killer whales that had interacted with dolphins had a lower proportion of pulsed calls and higher proportion of whistles and clicks compared to the control whales.

The ability to vocally learn is a survival technique

The ability of killer whales to learn vocally does not necessarily  mean that cetaceans have language in the way we associate with human beings the researchers said. However the skills the whales do posses suggest they have a high level of neural plasticity, which means their brains have the ability to adapt to incorporate new information. These marine animals would benefit if their social bonds were tied to learned vocalisations from other species because it would enable them to survive in different social groups and territories the researchers added.