In 2018, a study made headlines when it found that a captive orca, or killer whale, was able to imitate human speech. The whale, called Wikie, lived at the Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, France. Wikie was trained to produce the words “Ah ah,” “hello,” “Amy,” and “one two three.” (Wikie could also make a sound like a creaky door and imitate the call of an elephant.)
It really shouldn’t be surprising that whales have a knack for imitating speech. They’re very auditory animals, explains Deborah Giles, a killer whale scientist with the SeaDoc Society, an organization that conducts and sponsors scientific research in the Salish Sea.
“Killer whales make their living by being able to communicate over vast distances in order to know what the surrounding environment is like, where to find each other, and where to find food,” she says.
Communicating is just a part of who they are. Giles tells the story of Luna, a young Southern Resident killer whale who was separated from his pod and trapped in the Nootka Sound off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Isolated from others of his species, with whom he would have communicated, Luna began mimicking the sound of boats and other sea life in the area, apparently in an attempt to communicate.
It’s Part of Orca Culture
Communicating with one another is important because orcas are not just social animals, they’re cultural, says Lori Marino, a neuroscientist who studies animal intelligence and behavior, and is known particularly for her work with whales on the evolution of the brain and intelligence.
Marino describes culture as a group of habits and behaviors that are learned and passed from one animal to another, and from older animals to younger ones. The culture varies from one group or community of orcas to another.
“Orcas off the coast of New Zealand, for example, will have a different culture than ones off the Pacific Northwest,” she says. “Those cultural differences are learned, and really define who they are as a community.”
Most cultural behaviors are pretty serious and involve hunting, feeding, and raising young. Others are just fun — or weird. In the summer of 1987, young orcas from several pods of Southern Resident orcas began swimming around with dead salmon on their heads. A few whales started doing it, and pretty soon, the salmon hat was the backward baseball cap of the orca pod. By the next summer, salmon hats were so last year. Then the fad popped up again in 2024.
In recent years, orcas that live off the Iberian Peninsula have occasionally destroyed the rudders of boats. No one knows why, but it’s definitely a cultural behavior that spreads from one whale to another.
Read More: Instead of Hunting in Groups, Orcas May be Attacking Great White Sharks Alone
Killer Whales Have Huge Brains
All this cultural communication requires big, complex brains. When we hear that an orca can imitate human speech, we might be inclined to think: Wow, whales are so smart. They’re almost like us. But when it comes to brain structure and brain potential, it might make more sense to wonder if there are things we could do that make humans seem as intelligent as an orca, says Marino.
The orca brain weighs about 11 pounds. That’s three-and-a-half times larger than the human brain. It’s also large compared with the orca’s body size, about two-and-a-half times as big as you would expect for an animal of that size, explains Marino.
But it’s not just size. The orca brain is very complex. The orca neocortex, which contains regions involved with, among other things, cognition, emotion, memory, and yes, communication, is the most wrinkled neocortex of any animal brain on the planet, even more wrinkled than human brains, says Marino.
All those wrinkles allow more surface area of the brain to fit in the cranium. Think of it like a piece of paper that has been scrunched up to make it fit in a given space.
“There’s a lot that has to be packed into that cranium,” says Marino. The orca also has more neocortex relative to the rest of the brain than do humans. “What I’m saying,” she says, “is that this is an extremely elaborated brain in terms of neural tissues used in cognition, thinking, problem solving, and higher-order processing.”
Why Orcas Imitate Humans
Orcas communicate with whistles and clicks, and that communication has a structure, a simple — or not so simple — grammar, says Marino. Scientists have not yet “cracked that code,” she adds, but she notes that orcas’ ability to imitate tells you two things. One, orcas are vocal learners. And two, they have some level of awareness.
“In order to imitate, you have to compare what you’re doing with someone else,” she says.
Marino says she thinks the reason for the imitation is that the whales are trying to communicate. “If you’re in a situation where you have this other species keeping you in a tank, feeding you, asking you to do things, I think you’d want to try to communicate, try to make contact with that other being.”
What the Whales are Saying
Of course, we don’t know what whales are saying to each other with their clicks and whistles. But we may have a better idea soon. Monika Wieland Shields, co-founder and director of the Orca Behavior Institute, is one of a team of researchers who are using a hydrophone array to localize vocalizations to a specific group of whales or even an individual whale.
The team will pair those sounds with drone observations of whale behavior to learn more about how these animals are communicating. This research may not solve the mystery of the salmon hats, but it should offer insight into orca communication.
Read More: Orcas May be Smarter Than You Think, Here’s What to Know About Their Behaviors
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Avery Hurt is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she writes regularly for a variety of outlets, both print and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She’s the author of Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Probably Die From and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, as well as several books for young readers. Avery got her start in journalism while attending university, writing for the school newspaper and editing the student non-fiction magazine. Though she writes about all areas of science, she is particularly interested in neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and AI–interests she developed while earning a degree in philosophy.
